


The Commando that Time Forgot

by CrowningGlory



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: 1940s, Awesome Darcy Lewis, BAMF Darcy Lewis, Darcy Lewis-centric, Darcyland, F/M, Female Friendship, Male Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Time Travel, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-31
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-30 07:50:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 29
Words: 61,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6415150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrowningGlory/pseuds/CrowningGlory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy has always hated science, but she never realised how much trouble it could get her into... Until an internship with an astrophysicist somehow lands her in 1940s Brooklyn.  She has no idea how she's going to get home, but with new abilities, a new mission, and, most importantly, new friends, does she really want to go home?</p><p>Steve's puppy-dog eyes and Bucky's mischievous grin are really making her doubt her priorities, and then there's the small matter of the Red Skull trying to take over the world...</p><p>Rated explicit for occasional smut.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a complete sucker for time-travel stories where a character (preferably Darcy because she's the embodiment of awesome) winds up back in the 40s with Steve and Bucky, so... I'm writing one of my own! I think I know where I want this to go, but I keep changing the first few chapters, so I'm posting them to stop myself from editing them AGAIN. I have a feeling this is going to turn out really long, though, because there's so much I want to do with this story, and it's probably going to get away from me.
> 
> I hope you enjoy it, and if there's something you'd like to see happen, let me know, and I'll see if I think it will fit in with my plan.
> 
> Rated explicit for occasional smut.

Darcy Lewis has never been a big fan of science.

School came easy to her, and if it weren't for those three pesky words – _chemistry, biology, physics_ (she always spat them out like curses, prompting sniggers from her grandmother) – she would have swept her way to an early graduation at 15.  As it was, she had to settle for 16.  But, she thought, no matter how old she was, she couldn’t get out of there fast enough.  Firmly putting the whole horrific experience behind her, she swore to herself that she would never again have anything to do with science.  Well, not _science_ -science, anyway.  An avid debater, armed with the kind of strong opinions that come from growing up the village outcast in small-town Georgia, Political Science was her obvious choice for major.  She packed up her cherished iPod and her computer and stared for a long time at the contents of her closet before carefully selecting a few items to take with her.  Her clothes had become her armour over the years, projecting the image everyone expected to see anyway, keeping the girl underneath safe and hidden.  In a new town, with new people, maybe she wouldn’t need any armour.  Either way, she was ready to hope.  Ignoring her extensive nail polish collection, she dragged her suitcase out of her room, down the stairs and into her tiny, ancient Volvo, kissed her grandmother (who was _not_ crying, it was just windy), and said goodbye to her hometown, knowing she wouldn’t be back in a hurry.  If ever.

Culver was everything Darcy had hoped it would be: a melting pot of nationalities, classes, sexualities.  Sure, it had its jackasses, same as everywhere, but Darcy found friends, real ones, and boyfriends, though those never lasted long.  Three years passed in a happy whirlwind of bars (Darcy had a very impressive fake ID), dancing and pizza, consumed sitting on the floor in the corridors at 3am.  And studying.  Darcy did more of that than most people realised.

Then fourth year rolled around, and Darcy discovered that the universe – or more specifically, science – was still looking to make her life miserable.  Without six measly science credits ( _hard_ science, Miss Lewis, _not_ social science), Darcy couldn’t graduate.  She was about ready to give up entirely, drop out, live in a cardboard box and start stripping for money, when her friend interrupted her dramatic tirade to helpfully point out that an internship would get her the necessary credits without her having to do any actual science.  After, all, interns were just coffee mules anyway, right?

Which is how, just barely turned 20, Darcy found herself standing in the desert in New Mexico with two genius astrophysicists who possessed neither a lick of common sense nor the ability to take care of themselves, and pulling her taser on the God of Thunder.  Fortunately, Thor found the whole encounter highly amusing and proudly proclaimed Darcy his “lightning sister”.

But then S.H.I.E.L.D. barged into their lives and took Darcy’s iPod (oh, and all of Jane’s equipment, that too), and the sky dropped more Asgardians on them, which was cool, but also a metal monster, which was less cool, and Thor destroyed it but had to return to Asgard, leaving Darcy sad and Jane heartbroken.  Darcy, for her part, found herself able to breathe easily for the first time in days.  Still, she was coming to view Jane as the sister she never knew she needed, and she wished she could do something to erase that horrible, lost look in her eyes.

So now she doesn’t complain as Jane, determined to re-open the Bifrost herself, drags them from state to state, testing out theories and seeking out experts in various fields – not that asking for help is easy, what with the stack of NDAs they’ve had to sign.  Finally they’re standing on a rooftop in Brooklyn, ready to open up a small wormhole from their rooftop to the next rooftop over.  Darcy steps forward to place the guinea pig in position, fully expecting this to be failed experiment #94, when the sky darkens, and she looks up, frowning.

This proves to be a huge mistake when the sky goes from black to bright, brilliant purple, making spots dance in front of her eyes.  Suddenly she’s falling through thick blackness, so dark she thinks she’ll never see anything again – but then the purple light forces its way back through in a thin but dazzling beam that shoots straight towards Darcy.  She throws her hand out in front of her as though it will protect her, and the beam hits her palm like a laser.  The pain is burning, searing, and it doesn’t stop at her palm; it spreads through her whole body and she thinks she must be screaming – how could she not be, with this purple agony lancing through her body, relentlessly seeking out every one of her nerves and pressing a blowtorch to them?  So she opens her mouth and _screams_ , but she can’t hear anything over the rushing sound in her ears and she feels a hard jerk at the base of her spine, and she’s falling and falling and falling and then there’s light and the world returns as she slams, hard, onto the concrete, on her side.

She lies there for a few moments, winded, eyes closed, waiting for her breath to return.  The hellfire that was consuming her only seconds earlier is gone as though it was never there, but it’s left her shaky and nauseated, and her fall has given her other injuries.  She manages to roll onto her back, easing the pressure on her aching left arm, which she gingerly runs her right hand over.  It doesn’t appear to be broken, but she’ll have one hell of a bruise.  The concrete is hard and uncomfortable against her back, but she doesn’t want to get up.  Partly because she’s not convinced she’ll be able to stand without falling down again, but mostly because Jane and Erik haven’t come running over to check on her, so she knows something is horribly, horribly wrong, and she wants to lie in the bliss of ignorance for a long as possible.

But the bliss has already become fear, so after only a few seconds she forces her eyes open and levers herself to her feet with a determination forged in the flames of New Mexico and killer robots.  Sure enough, she sways on her feet and stumbles, throwing out her right hand to catch herself and finding a brick wall.  She’s in a small alley, so she shuffles forwards until she reaches the street, where she leans her back against a wall and swivels her head, trying to make sense of the spinning images in front of her.

As her vision settles, Darcy stares at the street, uncomprehending.

And stares a bit more.

A laughable, ridiculous, awful theory forms in the back of her mind.  Desperation takes root in her stomach as she spots a newspaper sticking out of a bin across the street and, gathering her strength, she pushes off from the wall and dashes towards it.  Someone cries out, tyres screech, and a horn almost deafens her, but she ignores it in favour of bracing herself against the hot metal pressing into her thigh before stumbling onwards.  She snatches the paper from the bin and fumbles with it for ten agonising seconds while she tries to get her brain to communicate with her fingers.  Eventually she finds what she’s looking for, and her eyes zero in on the little black letters clearly spelling out: _June 4 th 1940._

Darcy looks around her at the shops with their latticed bay windows and the men with their fedoras and the women with their long dresses and the black Fords, and thinks:

_Well fuck you, science._


	2. Chapter 2

The sun was already sinking when Darcy landed in an alley more than half a century back in time, and by the time she manages to persuade her feet to move again, night has fully set in and the streets are emptier.  She sets off down the road with no clue where she’s going and no sort of plan, just a sense that she needs to keep moving as the night grows more oppressive around her.

She doesn’t know how long she walks for, but it feels like forever.  Soon her feet ache and she’s starving and her head is spinning with exhaustion and the pain shooting up her left side and she glances down at her arm and sees red and realises she must have cut her arm on something, somewhere, but she doesn’t remember what.  She walks forever and the sun doesn’t rise.  She walks and walks and Jane doesn’t miraculously appear to bring her home.  She doesn’t wake up from what must be a nightmare, has to be, because even with everything she’s seen lately _time travel isn't real_ and she _can’t_ be in 1940, she _can’t_.  She walks and the night gets darker and darker and sucks her breath away and a hand closes around her wrist and yanks her towards a body reeking of alcohol and there are more hands on her from behind and burning breath on her neck and her head is tugged sideways by her hair and she’s saying something, she thinks it might be _no_ or _stop_ and she wants to fight but she’s so _tired_ –

“Hey!  Get away from her!”  The voice is male, angry, and then two of the four hands digging into her flesh are gone, and through blurry eyes she manages to focus on the sight of one of her attackers punching a small figure to the ground.  The man still holding her laughs, temporarily distracted by this new show.  Darcy expects her would-be rescuer to stay down, or to get up and run away, but when he forces himself to his feet he grabs a bin lid and raises it in front of him like a shield, taking up a defensive stance.

“Don’t you know what it means when a dame says ‘no’?” he spits out.  The man holding Darcy sniggers again, and something about the sound – cruel, mocking – brings her back to herself.  She shakes the fog from her head and drives her elbow back as hard and fast as she can into his well-padded stomach.  He doubles over with a choked-off sound and she twists out of his grip to drive her knee up between his legs, giving herself time to reach into her pocket for her beloved taser.  Which she left in her bag.  Back in 2011.

This sickening realisation falls like a hammer as she looks back up at her attacker, who is now straightening and twisting his features into a feral snarl.  She freezes, one hand still in her pocket, as her adrenaline rush leaves her as suddenly as it came.  The blows she managed to get in were weak from sheer exhaustion and instead of incapacitating the man she’s angered him.  He launches himself at her and she only has time to recoil a couple of paces, her back hitting solid brick, before his hands are around her throat and she can’t breathe.  She brings her hands up and scratches at his fingers, at his face as it fills her vision with inhuman fury, but he doesn’t even seem to notice.

Behind him she can hear fists colliding with flesh colliding with pavement, and another voice has joined the chorus of shouts, and then her attacker is being ripped away from her and she collapses to her knees on the concrete, wincing as she adds bruised kneecaps to her list of injuries.

For a few moments she stares at the ground, gasping for breath, before she manages to raise her head.  Her assailants are nowhere to be seen, and in their place stand two men who both look to be in their early 20s, but that’s about where the physical similarities stop.  The one standing furthest from her, still holding his improvised shield, is blond, with skin so pale she’d guess he probably suffered from vitamin D deficiency.  He’s only a couple of inches taller than she is and skinny, painfully so, like anything more than a gentle tap would snap every bone in his body.  Despite being less physically threatening than a goldfish, he carefully lowers the bin lid and makes a not-so-subtle effort to make his body language as unintimidating as possible.  He looks at her with kindness in his wide, baby-blue eyes, and she doesn’t think it’s specifically for her benefit – she gets the feeling that’s his default expression.  She’s reminded of a picture she once saw of a golden retriever with calm eyes and a butterfly perched at the end of its nose – she thinks she might be the butterfly.  As she stares, he brings a hand up to wipe at his mouth and she notices his bottom lip is split.  Putting two and two together, she realises that this fragile wisp of a man was the one who launched himself into the fray to help her, and refused to back down.  The revelation is jarring.  Darcy finds herself wanting to cry, or hug him, or throw up, or maybe all three.

She’s so wrapped up in gazing at the skinny man that she doesn’t notice the other one reaching for her until she feels his hand on his elbow.  His touch is gentle, but she starts as though he’s stabbed her and slaps his hand away.  His hands come up in the universal gesture of surrender and he backs up immediately, and she’s grateful.  She knows he was probably only trying to help her up, but there’s a feeling like an electric current running all over her skin, and she can’t bear the thought of physical contact right now.

She looks at the man who tried to touch her, and even in her shell-shocked state Darcy can appreciate that under different circumstances, she would not have minded his hand on her elbow.  Not at all.  Or on her knee, or her waist, or in her hair…  She blinks several times to clear the images welling up behind her eyes and focuses on the man in front of her.  The blond man makes her think of a soft, patient dog, of safety and comfort and cookies, and this man…doesn’t.  He’s tall and broad, with hair like coffee, in a cut that’s not quite neat.  It leaves strands brushing over his forehead, above ice-blue eyes and lips ready to smirk or snark or kiss or–

She mentally slaps herself again.  But she’s always liked a good analogy, and she can’t deny that the dark-haired man is heady wines and the click of a cigarette lighter and the rumble of thunder on a summer’s day – beautiful and intoxicating and trouble.  Definitely trouble.

Breathing a little easier now, Darcy tries to rearrange her features into something more approaching gratitude rather than the ‘escaped lunatic’ look she knows must be in her eyes, but she’s not convinced she succeeds, because alarm joins concern on the faces of her two saviours.  A look passes between them, a sort of silent communication, and it’s instantly clear that they’re close friends.  Tall, Dark and Handsome takes a step back at the same time as Blond Puppy steps forwards and crouches down in front of her, lowering himself to look her in the eye, but remaining at least a foot away.  He doesn’t reach out to her, but keeps his hands where she can see them.

“Ma’am, are you all right?” he asks, his tone not quiet, but gentle.  To his left, his friend snorts softly, and he shoots a quick, chastising look at him before turning back to Darcy and opening his mouth to say something else.  She doesn’t give him the chance.

“’M ok, I think,” she forces out.  Her attacker hadn't had his hands on her throat long before Tall and Dark had pulled him away, but her voice still sounds a little raspy.  It doesn’t waver, though, and she’s proud of that.  She’s Darcy Lewis.  She’s tased the God of Thunder and helped evacuate a town during a killer robot attack and faced down Jane Foster on a science bender.  A little back-alley attempted rape isn't going to shake her.  Much.  The dark-haired man raises one eyebrow.

“Doll, you look like the city chewed you up and spat you out again.”  His blond friend’s hand shoots out and whacks him on the knee and he sighs and tries again.  “Ok, ok, what I mean to say is: can we walk you home?  Is there someone we can call?”  He speaks with a Brooklyn drawl, and she wonders if that’s where she is.  Come to think of it, she hasn’t really been paying attention to the streets.  She’s pretty sure she’s still in New York – just in the wrong time – but since it’s not like there’s any reason why 1940s NYC would be familiar to her, she has no way of knowing for certain.

“Ma’am?”  The blond man’s voice pulls her back to the moment and she sees that they are both looking at her, waiting for her to answer.  She’s silent a moment longer, considering her response, and it dawns on her just how fucked she is.  A sob rises in her throat and she chokes it back stubbornly, along with the second one that follows when she remembers that she’s been throttled, and, hey, it hurts to swallow.

“There’s no one.”  It comes out as a whisper, and she repeats it, louder, trying not to sound like a lost little girl.  Another look passes between her rescuers and it occurs to her, vaguely, that she really ought to get their names.  And say thank you.  That would be polite.

“Well, at least let us escort you home,” the blond tries again.

“You can’t,” is the only reply she can come up with.  How is she supposed to explain her situation to them?  She’s not sure it’s even wise to try.

“You really oughta let us walk you home, doll.  This may have escaped your notice, but the city ain’t exactly safe at night.”  Darcy turns to glare at the dark-haired man, who, sure enough, is resisting a smirk.  He actually thinks he’s funny.  The blond lets out a long-suffering sigh and addresses her again.

“Bucky may not be very delicate about it”– this elicits a noise of indignation from Bucky –“but he has a point.  Won’t you let us walk you home?  Where is home?”

“Far,” Darcy murmurs, almost to herself.  “Very, very far…”

They stare at her for a long moment, and she stares back.  She has absolutely no idea what else to say to them.  She needs help, she knows that, but she doesn’t know how to ask, or how they’ll respond.  But the blond saves her the trouble.  Blushing slightly, he stammers out, “Well, ma’am, this – uh – this may seem forward, and it probably is, but – uhm – I promise that me an’ Buck, we only wanna help, and it’s dangerous out here by yourself, so maybe you would like to, er, if you have no objection…” he trails off, and casts a desperate look at Bucky, who seems to be enjoying watching him squirm, but finally takes pity on him and steps forward.

“What Steve’s tryin’ to say is, if home is too far away, perhaps you’d like to come with us.  We can take a look at that nasty cut, and we promise our intentions are honourable.”  His shark-like grin absolutely does not match up with his final statement, but it’s gently flirtatious rather than predatory, and Darcy feels she has plenty of reason to trust them both.  So she gives them the sunniest smile she can muster, gratefully takes them up on their offer and pushes herself to her feet, waving off their attempts to help.

“No, no, it’s fine, I can walk.”  She makes it five steps before her legs give out, but Bucky and Steve, who are quickly shaping up to be real knights in shining armour, catch her before she collapses.  Bucky’s arm snakes around her waist and Steve puts a hand on her elbow.

“What was that you were sayin’, doll?”

Darcy meets Bucky’s smirk with a wry grin.  “Ok, it’s possible I may need a _little_ help.  Thanks, um…”  She realises that they haven’t actually introduced themselves, and neither has she.

“The name’s James Barnes, doll, Bucky to my friends.”

She’s not sure how he gets ‘Bucky’ from ‘James’, but he just saved her life, so she rolls with it.  “Right.  Thanks, Bucky.”  If she’s going to be spending the night at their place, she figures that makes them friends.  His smile widens.  “And thank you…” She looks at the blond, who flushes again.  For someone who launched himself into a fistfight he had no chance of winning, he seems awfully shy.

“Steve Rogers, ma’am.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Bucky, Steve.  I’m Darcy Lewis.  Call me Darcy,” she adds, hastily, because she’s pretty sure Steve will try to call her “Miss Lewis” otherwise.

They make their way slowly back to Steve and Bucky’s place, with Darcy leaning on Bucky for support, and she learns that they are indeed in Brooklyn, that Steve and Bucky are 22, and that their apartment is a tiny affair, with two bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen that doubles as a living room.  She learns Steve is an only child, and his mother is a nurse in the infectious diseases ward.  Bucky, on the other hand, has a 10-year-old sister, Becky, and his mother works as a maid.  Both lost their fathers young, and moved in together a couple of years ago in an attempt to lighten the financial burden on their mothers.  Darcy fires off as many questions as she can, buying herself time to figure out what to tell them when they inevitably start questioning her.

Bucky is charming, clearly easy with people – especially women – while Steve is bashful, although his stammering lessens as they walk and she asks him about his mother.  She’s already decided she likes and trusts both men, but there’s something niggling in the back of her mind, something she ought to remember, like when she sees a familiar face on TV but can’t place the actor.  She can’t quite put her finger on it, and it’s bugging her more with every step.

They reach the apartment building and Steve leads the way up three flights of stairs before finally unlocking a faded green door and stepping inside.  He turns to look at her and gestures for her to step inside.  “Well, here we are.  It ain’t much, I know, but, it’s well…”  He shuffles his feet, obviously embarrassed, and she has an overwhelming desire to set him at ease.

“It’s home?” she finishes for him.  “That’s all that matters, really, isn't it?”  It does the trick, and he flashes her a blinding smile.

She stops in the doorway so suddenly that Bucky almost stumbles over her.  She knows that smile.  She studied history in school, of course, and they touched on World War II, but she hadn't delved any further into the subject after that except when it affected modern-day politics.  Still, a line from a mostly-forgotten textbook comes floating back to her now.

_Steve Rogers, also known Captain America, started his military career as army propaganda, but soon became the most notable hero of the 20 th century._

And, above the line of text, a photo, not of the skinny man standing before her now, but of a blond giant in red, white and blue.  But the smile.  The smile was exactly the same.


	3. Chapter 3

“So… What were you guys doing out so late?”

Bucky looks up the bandage he’s wrapping Darcy’s arm to look their newly-acquired ward in the eye.  She has very nice eyes, he thinks.  In fact, she has nice everything.  Long, soft chocolate-brown curls, milky skin, full lips and positively sinful curves.

“Bucky?”  Darcy’s gone slightly pink, two tiny spots of colour appearing high on her cheeks, and he realises he’s been staring into her eyes a little too long.  It’s not really his fault.  They’re very blue, so blue they’re almost green, like the ocean.  A man could drown in eyes like that, and it would be no hardship.  So sue him if he was a little distracted to answer.

“It’s Stevie’s fault,” he says, dragging himself back to the present.  At the stove, Steve winces but carries on stirring the hot chocolate they hope will calm their adrenaline-infused bodies into a state more receptive to sleep.  “Punk couldn’t sleep, went out for a walk.”  He scowls – this is a fairly regular occurrence, especially if Steve’s had an asthma attack.  He never wakes Bucky, of course.  No, the punk has to tough it out alone; he wouldn’t want to worry Bucky or disturb his sleep.  But Bucky can always tell when he’s gone out.  There’s something different about the apartment, something that wakes him and sends him tiptoeing to Steve’s door to check on him.  And then… “When I woke up and realised he was gone, I went looking for ‘im.  Gettin’ into fights is a habit of his, an’ I always end up havin’ ta pull ‘im out of the fire.”

Steve grimaces again but doesn’t object.  Darcy glances between them.  She’s been giving Steve strange looks ever since they got to the apartment.  Bucky would think he had competition, except her stares don’t suggest attraction.  It’s more like Steve is a puzzle she’s trying to solve, with a little troubled frown creasing her brow.

“I guess that explains the extensive first aid kit,” she says, gesturing at the box open on the couch.  She’s got a slight accent – she’s definitely not from New York – but he can’t quite place it.  “You’ve got enough supplies to make the cast of Grey’s Anatomy weep tears of–” She cuts herself off suddenly and Bucky frowns at her.  He has no idea what her last comment meant.  “Um, well, you have a lot of supplies,” she finishes weakly.

Bucky doesn’t push, doesn’t ask what she meant, but it hasn’t escaped his notice that she’s been very cagey.  Despite her beauty, Darcy might just be the strangest dame – or, indeed, person – he’s ever met.  She’s wearing jeans that cling to her like they’re several sizes too small, but she doesn’t seem uncomfortable in them, nor does she seem like a factory worker.  Her t-shirt, too, is strangely tight.  A myriad questions burn in his throat, but she has successfully kept him and Steve from asking any by continually posing her own, almost without pause.

“We always got gauze, doll.  More of a necessity than coffee, round ‘ere.”  He glares at Steve, who just keeps stirring like a champ, not rising to the bait.  If only he would do that more often.

“Nothing’s more necessary than coffee,” Darcy quips immediately, clearly relieved.  So far, Bucky knows nothing about her except her name and that she’s not from around here.  He wants to know more, but something in her posture is defensive, maybe even a little scared, and he feels a pressing need to put her at ease, especially after the ordeal she has just suffered.  Not that it appears to be affecting her much.  She seems determined not to let her strangulation experience prevent her from talking, even though he’s pretty sure it must be hurting her throat.  She sits straight-backed on the couch, tense and alert, but not shaking like he figures most girls would be.

Steve sets the hot chocolate on a tray and brings it over to the couch, kneeling to set it on the low coffee table and handing Darcy a mug.  She accepts it with a smile and blows on it.

“Thank you for this,” she repeats for the tenth time since they met her.  “For the hot chocolate, and the rescue, and bringing me here, and just generally, you know…”

Bucky sees a slight tremble in her fingers then, and chooses his next words carefully, voicing his sneaking suspicion.  “I’m gettin’ the impression, Darcy, that maybe you don’ have anywhere to go…?”  He knows he’s hit the mark when her eyes widen slightly and she flushes.  He ploughs on, not giving her the chance to object.  “If there’s nowhere else you can go, if there’s no one else you can call, you could… stay here.  For a little while.  Until you work somethin’ out.  Me an’ Stevie don’ mind.”

He watches as surprise flits across her face, followed by relief, then pleasure, before she regains control of her expression and smooths it into the half-sheepish, half-grateful look she’s been wearing ever since they first offered her their home for the night.

“That would be… that would be really helpful.  You’ve probably worked this out by now, but I don’t exactly have any money.  I can’t afford to pay you, cover expenses, that sort of thing… Oh!  It’s not much, but I’m a good cook.  And I can clean, obviously.”  She’s warming to the idea now.  “I’ll do whatever I can to help out.  Just until I work out a way to… to get home.”  She looks unconvinced, and Bucky wonders yet again where their mystery girl has come from, and why returning is such a problem for her.  Darcy falls back to thanking them profusely, clearly uncomfortable with taking their hospitality, but seeing no alternative.

Steve has been quiet throughout the exchange, but now he turns soft blue eyes on her with that look that always seems to make people want to reach out and ruffle his hair.  Bucky silently applauds him for good use of said look.

“No need to thank us, Darcy.  We’re happy to have you.  An’ we look forward to your cookin’.  Neither of us can cook worth a damn, just boil everythin’, so we’ve been missin’ decent food ever since we moved in here.”

That gets a more relaxed smile out of her, and, finishing their hot chocolate, they set about deciding sleeping arrangements.  Darcy adamantly refuses to allow either of them to give up their beds, and insists on sleeping on the couch.  Admittedly, this hurts Bucky’s manly sensibilities, and Steve pulls a face that has Bucky worried for a minute that he’s having another asthma attack, but Darcy proves as stubborn as Becky.  And despite being twelve years older than her, he’s hasn’t managed to win an argument with his sister ever since she learned to dig her heels in, chin jutting out and arms folded just like Darcy’s are now.

It only makes him more determined to help her.


	4. Chapter 4

Bucky wakes the next morning to unfamiliar smells and sounds from the kitchen.  For a moment he’s confused, then he remembers their unusual houseguest.  Darcy must have decided to get started on her ‘help with whatever I can’ plan and make breakfast.  Settling his head back on the pillows, he closes his eyes, letting himself drift.  He hadn't realised how much he’s missed this, this feeling of waking up in the morning, knowing someone is looking out for his wellbeing.  What with Steve being ill so much of the time, Bucky has insisted on doing most of the cooking since they moved in together, not wanting Steve to tire himself out unnecessarily.  Of course, Steve hates being taken care of and feeling like a burden, so there have been a few times he’s had to pry a pale, feverish Steve away from the stove and put him back in bed before he keels over and hurts himself.  Speaking of –

“ _Fuck!_ ”  There’s a clattering sound from the kitchen, followed by the tap being turned on.  Bucky springs out of bed and hurries into the kitchen.  Darcy’s standing at the sink, holding her hand under the running water and letting out an impressive stream of curses.  Bucky pauses by the kitchen counter and grins despite himself at her colourful – not to mention creative – language.  She must be feeling better.

“You alright, doll?” he asks, moving towards her.  “You hurt yourself?”

Darcy starts and turns towards him.  Her face is slightly crinkled in pain, but sure enough, the fire he’d glimpsed in her yesterday, subdued by shock, now seems to flow through her whole body, expressed in her every tiny movement, stiff though they may be from her bruises.

“It’s fine,” she replies, sounding more resigned than pained.  “I tried to move the eggs off the stove, but my hand slipped and I burnt it on the side of the pan.  Not my finest hour.”  Without warning, she jumps, her rueful smile turning to alarm.  “Argh!”  For a moment he thinks she hurt herself again – although he can’t see on what – but she pushes past him and snatches the offending pan up off the stove, turning off the heat.  She peers down at the eggs, letting out a relieved sigh.  “Phew.  Not burnt.  Thought I might have wasted the eggs for a minute there.”

And he can see it on her face, her genuine concern that she might have ruined their food.  Bucky looks at her, standing in their kitchen in her strange clothes, her hair loosely tied out of the way, revealing high cheekbones and delicate ears.  He moves on to the slight bruising around her neck and the purple and blue mottling her left arm, and he finds himself suddenly irrationally angry that this girl, alone, injured and far from home, is worried about wasting their eggs.  Then his eyes fall on her hand and he sees an angry red line stretching from the base of her thumb to the base of her index finger and he’s moving before he knows what he’s doing, taking the pan from her to set it down on the counter, and pulling her back to the sink.

“Fuck, Darcy!” he exclaims, as the water runs over the hand he’s holding under the tap.

“ _Bucky!_ ”  Steve has emerged from his room – _finally_ – just in time to be scandalised by Bucky’s language in front of a lady.  Bucky just rolls his eyes, remembering Darcy’s curses and feeling no need to coddle her.  She’s clearly heard – and said – much worse.

“Steve, get the first aid box out – _again_ ,” he urges.  “Darcy’s gonna need a bandage.”

Steve retrieves the kit and comes over to take a look, frowning.

“Darcy!” he gasps.  “That’s a vicious burn!”  He turns his attention from her hand to her face, and Bucky knows he’s expecting to see pain, maybe even tears, but Darcy just looks mildly annoyed at the fuss.

“I guess,” she shrugs.  “Really though, it’s nothing compared to –” She cuts herself off.  Bucky’s getting used to it.  “Well, let’s just say I’m re-evaluating my pain scale.”  She tries to smile, maybe at some private joke, but it comes out as a grimace.

Steve plates the eggs up with toast (“I saw your bread was going stale – waste not, want not, right?”) while Bucky wraps up Darcy’s hand.  Turning her hand palm up to secure the bandage, he pauses.

“Interestin’ tattoo you’ve got there, doll.  There a story behind that?”  He lifts his eyes to Darcy’s face and sees only confusion written there.  She looks down at the palm of her hand, cradled in both of his.  Inked into her creamy skin is a symbol he’s never seen before: a small circle in the centre with straight lines spreading out from it in all directions, each of them crossed through with more lines.  The strangest thing about it, though, is the colour.  It’s a deep, rich purple, and it… _shimmers._   He can’t think of a better way to describe the almost hypnotising way it catches the light and reflects it. Looking at her palm, Darcy’s face goes completely blank, like she doesn’t recognise her own hand, and for a moment Bucky worries that she sustained a head wound yesterday as well that they didn’t notice.  Then she looks up at him with a twist of her lips he thinks is supposed to be a smile.

“No.  No story there.  Just a pretty symbol, that’s all.”  She’s gone several shades paler than she was a moment ago, and he frowns at her and opens his mouth to say… something, though he has no idea what, but then she’s reclaiming her hand and Steve’s bringing their breakfast over to the kitchen counter.

As they eat, the conversation turns to plans for the day.  Darcy has somewhere she wants to go, though she won’t tell them where, just that it has something do to with maybe finding her way home.  She talks about getting home like she’s Dorothy, except it’s going to take a lot more than a pair of red slippers to get home.  Steve dragged him to that musical.  He pretended to hate it, but secretly he loved it.

Steve has newspapers to sell; with his health, it’s one of the few jobs he’s capable of doing.  He hates it and it pays badly, but he insists on doing his part even though Bucky has told him repeatedly that his job at the docks could keep them afloat.

“Manual labour?” Darcy asks, eyebrows raised, and he doesn’t miss the way her gaze travels down to his well-defined biceps and the outline of his pectorals under his shirt.  He flashes her the most lascivious smirk he can get away with while Steve is sat right next to them, and he expects her to blush and duck her head like most women do when he catches them staring.  Darcy doesn’t.  She stares brazenly back, one corner of her mouth turning up, then, slowly, she takes another bite of her breakfast.  His breath stutters, ever so slightly, and he turns back to his food to cover his surprise and his… something.  Beside him, Steve goes pink.  Bucky casts about for something to say, and ends up blurting out:

“Your clothes!”

“My clothes?”

She’s still wearing the same outfit they found her in yesterday, and it’s definitely going to draw attention the moment she steps out of the apartment.  Apart from being very odd, her clothes are dirty and torn.  He realises they haven't even offered her a shower.  Of course, he doesn’t explain any of this out loud.  What he says is:

“We have to get you out of those clothes.”

Steve goes from pink to red.  Bucky wonders, not for the first time, how his friend has stuck by him all these years and not had a heart attack, if this conversation is enough to make him blush so furiously.  Bucky enjoys the company of women, and he’s never been subtle about it.

“My, oh my, Mr Barnes, whatever are you proposing?”  Darcy’s voice is teasing, and Bucky realises that the slight accent he hadn't been able to figure out is southern, now come fully out to play.  “I assume you have something else for me to wear?  Or were you hoping I would walk around naked?  Not that that would be a bad thing,” she drawls, looking to Steve, “since we could save some money by frying the next batch of eggs on Steve’s face.”  Sure enough, Steve looks like he might start steaming at any moment, and Bucky shakes with mirth.

For now, Darcy showers and they find her some clothes of Steve’s to wear, which are actually an okay fit – despite being _very_ different shapes, they’re pretty much the same size, and Steve’s clothes are just loose enough to accommodate Darcy’s generous curves.  She keeps her own shoes.  Twisting her hair up into one of Steve’s caps, Darcy turns to them with a smile, arms spread wide.

“So?  Could I pass for a boy?”

“Never,” says Bucky, at the same time as Steve stammers “Um, sure.”

She throws her head back and laughs, stops when she has to catch the cap before it falls, and then giggles some more.  Bucky bites his tongue to keep from asking if it would really be so bad if she couldn’t find her way home.


	5. Chapter 5

It takes ten minutes of assuring the boys that yes, she knows how to find the corner where Steve will be selling newspapers, and no, she really doesn’t need an escort, half an hour of pulling uncomfortably at her clothes and various bandages, and two hours of walking in circles before Darcy finally finds her way back to the street where she was so unceremoniously spat out, bruised and shaking, by what she could only assume was the time-space continuum.

_Time-space continuum.  I can’t believe I'm actually having to worry about that like it’s a real thing.  When did my life become a third-rate episode of Doctor Who?  Let’s just hope I’m not causing some sort of butterfly effect…_

She stops dead in her tracks and looks around, hoping that she’s made a mistake and this isn't the right street.  But nope, there’s the dressmaker’s, and the taxi rank, and there’s the bin she took the newspaper from to check the date, and right over there is the alley where she landed.

The alley which is now surrounded by police tape and cops.

Darcy can’t remember anything about the place that would attract the attention of the police, but she’s recently decided that she doesn’t believe in coincidence, and to be fair, she wasn’t in the most observant of moods when she was last here.  So it’s possible there’s some sign of her presence – or the presence of something mysterious and science-y enough to bring the cops out, and she’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to find herself detained and questioned by the authorities.  She can’t see that ending well for her.

Still, other than the symbol on her palm, which she’s pretty sure isn't a tattoo (she’s had her fair share of drunken mistakes, just like any college girl worth her salt, but a tattoo was never one of them – and besides, it’s got a tell-tale otherworldly gleam to it), that alley is the only lead she has on finding out what happened to her.  So, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible and hoping no one notices her distinctly 21st-Century Converses, she sidles up to the police tape, elbowing her way through the curious crowd gathered around.  She follows the gazes of the people around her down to the ground, and nearly falls over in shock.

There, burned into the concrete, is an intricate, circular symbol looking distinctly like a smaller version of the one Thor made in Puente Antiguo when coming and going from Asgard.  Breathing in shallow pants, she pushes her way back out of the crowd, ignoring the grumbles and huffs, and hangs onto a lamppost to keep her upright.  Her head is reeling.  She looks down at her hand and examines the mark on her palm more closely.  Now she thinks about it, that symbol looks familiar.  Not in an ‘I’ve seen that exact symbol before’ kind of way, but in an ‘I’ve seen similar symbols before’ kind of way.  She’d bet Steve’s ill-fitting clothes that her new tat, the burn marks on the concrete, and her (hopefully not one-way) trip to 1940 are connected to some ancient Norse mythological magical bullshit.

 _Ok. Ok, think.  What was Jane trying to do?  Open a wormhole.  Just a little one.  Nothing major._   She snorts.  At what point in her life did opening “just a little” wormhole become another day at the office?  Curse her for getting so comfortable with the idea of Jane ripping holes in time and space.  _No, not time_ and _space, just space.  The wormhole was supposed to transport the guinea pig from one rooftop to another, not from one rooftop to a different fucking century!  So what went wrong?_ She remembers the purple lights in the sky, the beam coming towards her like a weapon, the hand she threw out towards it… She looks down at her palm.  _Well, I guess that’s where the tattoo came from.  So… Maybe Jane’s wormhole was working fine, until Asgard ran some kind of interference, and that… knocked me off course?_   She has a distant memory of Jane trying to explain space-time to her one afternoon while she half-listened, shuffling Jane’s notes into some sort of order, ready for her to type them up.  (“Jane, this is your bank statement.  You can’t use your bank statement to work out equations on... no, Jane, it needs to be filed… Jane, honey, do you actually know what a bank statement is? … Right.  Sorry I asked.”)  She probably wouldn’t have understood much of it anyway, but she did manage to glean something about space and time being linked, or the same thing, or something like that… So perhaps it made some sort of sense that a wormhole through space might malfunction and turn into a wormhole through time.  Kinda.

Jane would be proud of her.

Letting go of the lamppost, she’s pleased to discover that her legs are cooperating with her brain again, and she’s about to tell them to take her… somewhere, when she spots two of the policemen breaking away from the group.  One is average height, stocky, with coarse red hair and small, darting eyes; the other is a similar height, but sleeker, with dark brown hair and a sharp face.  His eyes are hard, flinty.  Something about them sets off alarm bells in her head.  They don’t move like the other cops; they remind her far more of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s jackbooted thugs.  Same upright, militaristic posture, same alertness, like they expect to be ambushed at any moment.  Same lack of humour, too, she bets.

It’s probably a terrible idea, and might land her in a cell somewhere no one will ever find her (although, she thinks mournfully, only two people would even know she was missing), but she follows them.  They stop on a street corner and start conversing.  It’s too quiet for her to hear, but she doesn’t dare get any closer and tip them off.  So she stops outside a bakery and pretends to develop a great interest in their pastries.

Risking a glance to her left, she sees Flint-Eyes holding out a small, round stone to his companion, offering it for his inspection.  With a jolt, she realises it’s the _exact_ same shade of purple as the symbol on her palm.  Damnit, she _has_ to get closer, she _has_ to hear what they’re saying –

A wall of noise hits her and it’s all she can do to stay on her feet.  She can hear _everything._

A mother scolding her children.

A man laughing at his co-worker.

A squeal of brakes.  A dog barking.  Fingers drumming on a desk.  A bird chirping, a boy whistling, a child singing, a baby crying, teeth chewing, hearts beating, blood pumping –

_STOP!  TOO LOUD!_

The noise fades as suddenly as it came, and she’s left leaning against the window of the bakery, breathing hard, ringing in her ears, itching on her palm.

_Wait, what?_

She looks down at her hand, and the mark is… _glowing_.  But even as she watches, it fades, and within seconds she’s beginning to wonder if she hallucinated the whole thing.  Then she looks to her left and sees the men still standing there, still looking at the purple stone, and her eyes narrow in thought.  She concentrates hard on her desire to hear them, and only them, and…

Her palm begins to glow again, brighter and brighter, and she balls her hand into a fist and presses it against her leg.  Then the rest of the street becomes silent and she can hear only the two agent-like policemen.

“…weren't expecting this.  Regardless, the Stone is here.  Better call it in.  Schmidt will want to know – about this, and that we have a visitor,” Flint-Eyes is saying.  His voice is smooth, silky – and utterly cold.

 _Schmidt?_  Darcy thinks.  _Common German name, but still, this_ is _1940s America…_

“An Asgardian?”

_Woah.  Ok.  Knowledge of Asgard.  That... That’s worrying.  I was right about these two.  Guess our run-in with S.H.I.E.L.D. taught me something after all.  Like how to be suspicious._

“No.  The Stone has been drained.  It has already transferred its power to a host – and if the stories are to be believed, the hosts are always human.  Still, you saw the markings on the street.  Human or not, whoever our visitor is, he doesn’t belong here.”

Darcy looks down at her hand, scrunched up against her thigh.  Putting two and two together really isn't hard at this point – clearly, she’s this _host_ they’re talking about.  She knows she should be reeling by now, but she’s not sure anything could surprise her at this point.

The red-haired man swears and rubs his chin.  “This isn’t good.  Schmidt won’t be happy we found a Power Stone – not one that’s already drained.  We need to find the host.”

“Agreed.  Start canvassing the area.  Talk to shopkeepers, taxi drivers, residents.  Anyone who might have seen our man coming out of that alley last night.”

 _He_ doesn’t belong, _our man…_ She grimaces at the assumption they’ve made.  Well, that’s the 20 th century for you.  Still, would it really have been much different in the 21st?  It would be reassuring that they’re too stupid to think to look for a woman, but once they start hearing eyewitness accounts of a wild-eyed girl stumbling across the street in strange clothes and causing traffic, she knows she’ll lose that advantage.

The redhead nods.  “And you?”

Taking one last look at the stone in his hands, the dark-haired man slips it into his pocket with a sigh.  “I’m going to take this back to Schmidt.  Do me a favour – work fast.  The sooner we find the host, the sooner I go from the man who brought the Red Skull bad news to the man who brought him an enhanced to… play with.” 

Darcy’s blood turns to ice in her veins.  There’s so much about the conversation she’s heard that should worry her: these men know she’s here, that she shouldn’t be here, that she’s been changed, _enhanced_ , somehow, and they’re _looking for her_.  God only knows what they’ll do when they find her.  But all she can focus on are the two words rattling around inside her head, banging at her skull, threatening to burst from her in a scream.  Two words that belong in a history textbook, describing a phantom, a bogeyman, a figure of terror so long-dead that she had no reason to fear him except as a child in horror stories.  _Red Skull._

She’s so focussed on her rising panic that she almost misses the parting words spoken by the two men.

“Hail HYDRA.”


	6. Chapter 6

“Thank you very much, sir.”  Steve accepts a gentleman’s money with a smile and hands him a newspaper.  Not many young men are still selling newspapers on street corners at his age, he knows, but he doesn’t mind.  What does bother him is the knowledge that Bucky is down at the docks every day, breaking his back to earn his wage and keep them both afloat.  Steve is determined to do whatever he can to contribute, even if it’s only a pittance.  He’d do anything to lighten Bucky’s load – which only makes it more frustrating that there’s so little he’s actually capable of.

“Steve!”  A woman’s voice startles him from his thoughts and he sees Darcy coming towards him, a bright smile on her lips.  As she crosses the road, people turn to stare, some trying to be subtle, others not.  Half of the looks she attracts are admiring, even lustful; the other half are confused and disapproving.  It’s clear to anyone who looks that she’s a woman – and a very beautiful one at that – in men’s clothing.  As Darcy nears him, people turn their gazes from her to him, and there are more than a few raised eyebrows going around.  He flushes – he can only imagine what people must be thinking.

Darcy’s in front of him now and he opens his mouth to tell her that they need to get her some new clothes – and closes it again.  From a distance, she had looked cheerful, and yes, the wide smile is still there, but now she’s close, he can see her expression is obviously forced, and how pale she is.  Her hands are pressed into her pockets in what he initially thought was nonchalance, but now he thinks it’s to hide how she’s shaking ever so slightly.  She looks – well, she looks scared.

“Darcy?” he asks carefully.  “Everythin’ ok?”  He winces internally at how pathetic the words are.  Everything is clearly not ok, but he doesn’t know what else to say.  The truth is, he has no idea how to speak to women, and beautiful dames like Darcy pose a particular problem for him.  He usually leaves this stuff to Bucky.

“Oh!  Oh, yes, yes, everything’s great!”  Her voice is clear and brittle, like she’s going for chipper but she’s too tense.  “I just, I have a question.  Yes.  Um.  Have you…that is, have you and Bucky, y’know, told anyone about me?  Like, does anyone know I’m staying with you?”

“No!” Steve protests, startled.  “No, I haven't told anyone about you.”

Darcy seems to relax a little, but she presses, “And Bucky?”

“Well, it’s not like we’ve discussed it or nothin’, but I don’ think Bucky woulda said anythin’ to anyone.”  Steve grins.  “He may be a bit of a lothario, but he’s surprisin’ly discreet.”  At that, Darcy’s smile grows more genuine, and Steve surprises himself by reaching out and resting a hand on her arm.  “If you’re worried about it, we can talk to Bucky when he gets home.  I'm sure he’ll agree to keep his mouth shut.  No one has to know you’re with us.”

She’s nodding and looking at him with complete trust now, so he takes the plunge.  “Darcy, I hope you don’ mind me askin’ – I'm only tryin’a look out for you – are you… hidin’ from someone?”

Darcy’s silent for a long few moments, and when she speaks, she sounds like she’s weighing each word.  “Not yet… but I think I might be.  Soon.”  Then she grabs his hand where it’s resting on her elbow.  “But I promise you, Steve, I’m not a criminal, I haven't done anything wrong, I promise.  And I won’t –” she chokes on her next words and looks at him with determination so fierce he has to fight the urge to take a step backwards.  “I will never, _ever_ , put you or Bucky in danger.  Ok?  If I think you guys could get into trouble because of me, I’m gone.  I won’t let anything happen to you on my account.”

There’s so much that he wants to say to her, to ask her.  He wants to know where she came from, why she’s so alone, what she’s frightened of.  He wants to tell her that she’s _not_ alone, that he and Bucky have her back, that she shouldn’t be afraid to lean on them, that they’re willing to take a risk to keep her safe.  But the strength of her conviction is bearing down on him like a physical force, burying all his words, and all he can do is nod.

“Ok.  Good.  Glad we got that cleared up.”  She’s visibly calming down, the colour returning to her cheeks and her hands coming out of her pockets.  Speaking of pockets.

“We need to find you some proper ladies’ clothes,” Steve says, deciding now is as good a time as any for a change of subject.  He’ll tell Bucky later about their conversation and Darcy’s fear; maybe his friend will know how to get her to open up.  Either way, he resolves to keep a close eye on Darcy from now on.

Darcy shrugs at him sheepishly.  “Can’t.  I don’t have any money, remember?  I don’t mind borrowing your clothes for a little while longer, if you don’t mind lending them.”

“Bucky ‘n’ me’ll buy your clothes.  You can’t keep wearing our clothes, people’ll talk.  And I don’ know why, but you wanna avoid attention, right?”

He can see her resistance flagging at his last comment, but she rallies and stammers out, “Oh no, I couldn’t –”

“Darcy,” he interrupts, and he’s surprised at his own forcefulness, but this _matters_ , he has to show her _she matters_ , “We gotta get you some proper women’s clothes.”

She just looks at him, apparently no longer sure how to react.

“Darcy.”  He repeats her name again, needing desperately to hold her attention now he’s got it, and looks her straight in the eye.  “We’re gonna help you.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy finds her feet in Brooklyn, and starts to learn about her powers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the longest chapter yet - it kind of ran away from me. And I didn't even put in half the stuff I actually wanted to. That's going to have to wait for the next chapter. There were just so many threads I wanted to get under control first.

Sometimes, Darcy just wants to cry.  She’s not sure if they would be happy tears or sad ones, but there’s something about the way Steve and Bucky have welcomed her into their home, never asking too many questions, never expecting anything in return, that causes her chest to tighten almost painfully.  She can’t put a finger on the feeling, can’t name it.  It’s not gratitude.  It’s something far deeper, more powerful.  It hits her often, and without warning: when a song she recognises plays over the radio, and she sings along until they both join in, Steve singing quietly, like he doesn’t want anyone to notice, Bucky loud and deep, with a baritone she swears she can feel in her toes.  Or when she curses, and Bucky laughs while Steve manages to both blush _and_ frown disapprovingly at the same time.  Or when she hands them their dinner, and they eat around the tiny kitchen island, and the boys make noises of approval – and some of the sounds that come from Bucky should _not_ be heard in public.

It’s been three weeks since the universe saw fit to drop her into their laps, and she’s beginning to wonder if there’s not a higher power she can send a thank-you card to.  Not that she doesn’t miss Jane and Erik (and her iPod, and her laptop, and a real bed – she’s still sleeping on the couch, despite Steve and Bucky’s protests), and she had been so looking forward to seeing Thor again.  But she’s – well, she’s _happy_.

So far, HYDRA hasn’t found her.  There’s been no sign of the two HYDRA agents from her second day in Brooklyn, and she’s starting to relax.  She still has no idea how she’s supposed to get home, though – her only real lead was the alleyway with the markings on the concrete, and she hasn’t been back there since the day she realised how much she would be worth to the Red Skull.  She tells herself it’s because it’s too risky, that HYDRA is almost certainly keeping an eye on the alley, but the truth – which she’s struggling to admit to herself – is that she’s just not particularly motivated to solve the mysteries of how she got here, and, by extension, how to get back.

True to their word, the boys – _her_ boys now – have been very discreet.  Despite Steve’s assurances, she’d had her doubts about Bucky, but when they broached the subject with him the evening of the day she’d seen the HYDRA agents, he’d nodded and suggested they tell anyone who asked that she was Steve’s distant cousin.  Initially, she had worried that this plan would cause problems with Sarah, Steve’s mother, but Steve just smiled slightly and shook his head.  The next day, when he took her to meet his mother, he introduced her with:

“Ma, this is Darcy.  She’s stayin’ with me ‘n’ Buck for a while, an’ if anyone asks, she’s my cousin.”

Darcy would have expected any mother to be a little alarmed that their son was claiming a total stranger as his cousin, or maybe at least have a few questions about that decision, but not Sarah.  Sarah fixed Darcy with soft eyes (brown – she supposed Steve must have gotten his baby-blues from his father) and Darcy was pretty sure the older woman could see into her soul.  But there was only kindness in her expression when she offered Darcy tea and proceeded to tell her silly stories about her fellow nurses.  Darcy took an instant liking to her and has been visiting ever since, seeking out her company whenever she starts to feel starved of female friendship.

It’s easy to see where Steve learnt his compassion and his compulsion to stand up for the underdog.  Sarah is unfailingly gentle, but as she tells Darcy stories of Steve’s childhood, Darcy can see the shadow behind her eyes.  She blames herself for her son’s poor health (especially his asthma, which, Darcy is horrified to learn, is considered a psychological issue rather than a physical condition in this time) and for all the times Steve returned home beaten and bloody, because Tim Allock was picking on little Johnny Ness, or Allan Thatcher was pulling Nancy Hughes’ braids, and Steve couldn’t let that stand.  But there’s pride there, too: Sarah’s glad to have raised such a brave son ( _just like his father,_ she tells Darcy).  A pattern emerges from Sarah’s tales, and Darcy soon realises that ever since Bucky and Steve met at the tender age of five, they’ve been inseparable, and Bucky, always large for his age, appointed himself Steve’s bodyguard.  It all balances out in the end: Steve, the protector of the weak and downtrodden, and Bucky, the protector of Steve.

She also suspects Sarah filches bandages and iodine from the hospital occasionally, but Darcy keeps that to herself.  Whatever they have to do to keep Steve in one piece is ok in her book.

Sarah teaches Darcy to sew, building on a foundation Darcy’s grandmother has already laid down.  When her Grandma tried to teach her, Darcy responded with sullen scowls and reluctant cooperation, but Donna Lewis was adamant that Darcy needed to know how to mend tears and replace buttons, so she has the basics.  In a strange new – or rather, old – world, however, Darcy feels suddenly desperate to learn whatever skills she can, and quickly finds herself enjoying Sarah’s lessons, especially once Sarah produces patterns and starts walking her through how to make her own clothes.  Darcy resolves to make her grandmother a new blouse, as a thank you, and an apology, when she sees her again.  If she sees her again.

She’s met Bucky’s family too.  Apparently it was only a matter of time before Bucky’s mother showed up unannounced on their doorstep to check in on (read: fuss over) Steve, and scold Bucky for some misdemeanour, real or imagined, so both boys estimated it wiser to introduce Darcy to Winnifred Barnes before she found her on the couch and jumped to unholy conclusions.  So Bucky took Darcy to his mother’s place one Sunday afternoon, and Winnifred received the news that Steve had a never-before-heard-of distant cousin with a healthy dose of suspicion, which Darcy felt was a much more normal response than Sarah’s.  Still, it was unfortunate, since Winnifred grilled Darcy with questions about herself for a good hour.  Darcy managed to either sidestep or answer as truthfully as possible – she knew that the more she lied, the more likely she was to mess up her story.  By the end of their visit, though, Darcy figured Winnifred had taken a liking to her, since she seemed to have lumped Darcy in with Steve as another person needing to be shielded from Bucky’s ‘wicked ways’.

10-year-old Rebecca didn’t say a single word the entire time Darcy was there, instead opting to watch her silently with wide, dark eyes.  As they were leaving, Winnifred reminded Bucky (for the fifth time) to ensure Steve and Darcy were getting enough to eat (which seemed weird to Darcy, since she was the one in charge of the cooking) and Rebecca startled Darcy by pressing a wad of paper into her hand.  She still didn’t speak, but when Darcy opened the paper up later, she discovered it was a drawing of herself, flanked by Bucky and Steve.  All three of them were holding hands and sporting huge smiles.  The picture was surprisingly well-drawn, but Darcy remembered Bucky and Steve were both artists; one or both of them must have taught Rebecca.  Neither man commented when the drawing ended up stuck to the fridge.

They’ve also followed through on Steve’s promise to buy her clothes.  Uncomfortably aware of how much she was already relying on them for, Darcy wasn’t at all happy with the idea, and insisted they spend as little money as possible.  Steve took her to a small shop owned and run by an old schoolmate of Sarah’s who babysat Steve when he was a child, and was overjoyed to see him again.  Darcy had been wondering just how much Steve could get away with by shoving his hands in his pockets, widening his eyes and flashing that bashful little half-smile.  The answer?  A lot.  Despite his usual shyness, Steve has a carefully-cultivated innocent look that Darcy suspects Bucky had a strong hand in developing.  It sends older women into flutters of cooing and cheek-pinching, and Martha the dressmaker turned out to be no exception.  When Martha eventually saw fit to release them, Darcy left with two house dresses, one red with white polka dots, one blue and flowery, a pair of empire sandals and a pair of Oxfords, all at hefty discount.  And before they could make it out the door, Martha thrust a deep purple swing dress on Darcy, entirely free of charge, shutting down her protests with the claim that a more formal dress was an absolute necessity for a young lady.  Darcy felt vaguely ill-at-ease with the whole thing – she’s not accustomed to such generosity – but her worries were forgotten when they arrived home and she modelled her new dresses for Bucky.  Watching his eyes darken as he took in the way her new clothes hugged her curves and flared out at her hips definitely took the edge off her discomfort.  And created a new discomfort.

So, armed with reliable friends and a flattering new wardrobe, Darcy has settled into a comfortable routine for the past three weeks.  Each morning she makes it a point to wake up before Bucky and Steve and have breakfast waiting for them when they make it out of bed.  She eats breakfast with them, hands them the lunches she’s packed and waves them goodbye as they head out to work.  Then, with the apartment to herself, she turns to her own business: figuring out what the hell kind of powers she’s got.

She started by experimenting with her hearing, trying to see if she could bring back the laser-like focus she had achieved on the HYDRA agents’ conversation.  Recalling her desire to hear their voices and nothing else, she picked a faint sound at random – a dog barking somewhere outside – and _wanted_ to hear it more clearly.  Then the dog stopped barking, and she chose to concentrate on two people talking in the hall.  Then the people went away, and she had to find a new noise.  This continued for about half an hour, with Darcy growing increasingly frustrated until she noticed the hum of the refrigerator.  Unlike the other sounds she had picked, this was a constant noise, giving her the time she needed to work up her focus.  She achieved her goal surprisingly quickly after that: instead of the sudden rush of unmanageable sounds that had nearly incapacitated her the day of the HYDRA incident, the whine of the fridge grew steadily louder until she realised that it was all she could hear, and it was _way too loud._   The moment she thought it, it was like a switch had been flipped: the fridge returned to its usual volume, and the rest of the world returned, like she’d pressed pause and then play.

A couple of days later, it occurs to her that her hearing might not be the only thing that she can enhance, and she tests out her other senses, applying the same principles.  She starts with vision, since that seems like the safest option, and is thrilled to discover she can now operate her eyes like a pair of binoculars.  She can literally _zoom in_ on objects.  Colours are richer and brighter, shapes are more defined, the whole world seems _sharper_.  She still needs her glasses though; fine-tuning her senses wears her out, and although she’s working on her endurance, she can still only sustain her heightened senses for a short period of time.  The first time she experiments with her sight, she forgets to remove her glasses, and the combination of her prescription and her shiny new super-vision gives her a migraine so strong that she’s still whimpering on the couch when her boys return home in the evening.  They fuss over her and bring her blankets and tea, and turn the lights down and talk to her in whispers, and finally settle down with their backs against the couch and just sit with her, letting her bury her hands in their hair for comfort, like she used to do with her grandmother when she had a nightmare, but hasn’t done in years.

So maybe it’s not all bad.

But she’s very careful after that to take off her glasses first, and takes serious precautions when testing her final three senses.  With touch, she actually strips naked before selecting the softest blanket in the apartment to feel with her hands.  Even wearing no clothes, she can feel every dust particle on every inch of her skin, and the blanket is suddenly coarse under her fingers.  Her skin is sensitive for hours afterwards, and her clothes itch like thousands of tiny hooks catching on her flesh when she finally pulls them on again.  She doesn’t revisit that sense much after that – she figures she’s unlikely to need it anyway.  It’s with great trepidation, therefore, that she approaches smell and taste, and she selects an apple as her test subject, figuring she can’t go far wrong with fresh fruit.  She’s forced to reconsider a few minutes later when the apple turns out to be extremely tart, and she’s left choking on the floor, eyes streaming.  At least the smell test goes off without a hitch.

The symbol on her palm continues to shine each time she uses her powers, and at one point during a hearing test she watches herself in the mirror.  When she sharpens her hearing to the point where it’s almost unbearable, she’s somehow not all that surprised to see her eyes start to _glow purple_.  Then she swears she catches sight of her roots changing colour and she abruptly stops before she starts to look like an anime character.  The colour recedes and she relaxes.  Clearly, she needs to be careful not to over-extend her abilities in public; a girl turning a nice shade of plum on a street corner would be a dead giveaway to HYDRA, but at least she doesn’t need to worry about a permanent makeover.  She’s not sure how she would explain _that_ one to her boys, even if they’ve been very good at not asking too many questions so far.

That evening, she starts to sew herself a lightweight pair of gloves.  They won’t be particularly comfortable considering it’s summer, but she figures she really ought to cover up the mark on her palm.  Her life might actually depend on it.

Her afternoons, she dedicates to library-hunting.  Obviously, her passage into the past and her new powers are somehow linked to Asgardian magic, so she hops from library to library in search of any books she can find on Norse mythology.  She can’t check the books out, so she finds a seat in the building and settles down to research anything that might explain her abilities or how to get home.  The former fills her with a kind of wary excitement; the latter… well, for the time being she’s content not to examine that particular ball of lead in her stomach too closely, thank you very much.

A lazy, sleepy afternoon one day finds her flicking absent-mindedly through a book about runes without paying it much attention.  She doesn’t actually expect it to tell her anything useful, but it’s the only vaguely relevant book in this library, and she walked for two hours to get here, so she may as well make the most of it.  She freezes suddenly over the pages, and fights to keep all her senses from going into overdrive, which is a serious risk these days when something surprises her and her body goes into high alert.  Slowly, she lowers her hand and slides her finger behind the page she just turned, and flicks it over.  There, staring up at her, is a very familiar symbol.  She turns her hand over and rests it, palm up, next to the page, comparing the two markings.  Underneath the illustration in the book, is a caption that reads:

 _The Helm of Awe (Old Norse_ Ægishjálmr _, pronounced “EYE-gis-hiowlm-er”) was believed to provide protection and power for the bearer, and inspire fear in one’s enemies.  The “arms” of the Helm appear to be Z-runes, the meaning of which had much to do with protection and prevailing over one's enemies._

Well.  That’s something.  She thinks back to something the HYDRA agents said, about the Power Stone being drained, that it had passed its power on to a host.  The Stone has certainly given her power, and it seems to have left a visible trace behind in the form of the shimmery purple mark on her hand.  She re-reads the caption, thoughtfully.

_‘Protection and power for the bearer’… I wonder… Maybe there’s more that I can do?_

She looks out the window.  The sun is getting low, but it’s summer, so it won’t be dark for hours yet.  It would be better to do this under cover of darkness, but she can’t wait that long.  Besides, Steve and Bucky would be so upset with her if she deliberately stayed out alone until dark.  Sometimes she thinks they were more scarred than she was by the unfortunate incident that brought her to them.  So she closes her book and makes her way out of the library, round to the back of the building, where she noticed a medium-sized, relatively enclosed space earlier, with nothing in it but trashcans.  It’s surrounded by brick walls, and the ground is dusty concrete.  It’s about as private a place as she’s going to find in Brooklyn.

Standing in the centre of the little yard, she realises she has no idea what to do.  She discovered her acute hearing because of an intense desire to eavesdrop, and it seemed like a logical leap to see if she could do something similar with the rest of her senses.  But right now, she’s just hoping for some ability she may or may not even have to just… happen.  So she does the only thing she can think of.  Calming her breathing, she enters the almost meditative state that she reaches when she’s focussing on one particular sense.  It’s a little harder this time, because she can’t focus on her sight, or her hearing – she’s not trying to super-charge her senses.  In the end, she settles for spreading her focus, forcing herself to become hyper-aware of every inch of her body, her breathing, the beat of her heart.  She raises her hands in front of her experimentally, like a priest blessing a crowd.  Steadily, she notices a tingling running over her that seems to come from her core and creep slowly outwards, until it’s skittering all over her skin.  It’s ticklish at first, but then it grows stronger and hotter until she thinks it’s going to burn her.  It’s seriously painful now, and she’s starting to panic.  The sensation flares, bright sparks of pain erupting up and down her arms and legs, and just when she thinks she’s going to scream, instead she _pushes_.

And purple lightning arcs from the symbol on her palm, scorching the wall in front of her.

A grin splits Darcy’s face and grows, wider and wider and wider.

 _Awesome_ , she thinks.  Then images from the Red-Skull themed nightmares she’s been fighting off for the past three weeks surge to the front of her mind, and her next thought is:

_Well.  This evens the playing field._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m playing VERY fast and loose with this Helm of Awe symbol – I’m twisting its meaning somewhat to suit my purposes, but I really wanted a real Norse rune to put in this fic. Please Google it for an accurate description of what it symbolises. Let’s call it artistic licence and never speak of it again. Shh.
> 
> Apologies for the TOTAL lack of dialogue in this chapter - I promise there will be plenty of interaction between our three main characters in the next chapter.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy feels a little more confident now that she can fry HYDRA agents.  
> Bucky and Steve worry about Darcy, and she tries to ignore the way they melt her heart.  
> Bucky and Darcy tease Steve over dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a bit of writer's block over this chapter, so it took me longer than I thought it would. I also didn't do what I was originally intending to do with it, so that'll have to happen next chapter. Story of my life.  
> Anyway, as promised, this chapter has some actual dialogue! Enjoy a bit of Darcy, Bucky and Steve fluff.

Darcy sticks around in the little yard behind the library for a couple more hours to experiment with her new power.  Maybe _play with_ would be a better term – she feels like a kid who just scored the world’s best birthday present.  She discovers she can run the charge all over her body, but if she wants to project the lightning, it has to come from the symbol on her right palm.  With three weeks’ experience learning to control her heightened senses under her belt, getting a hold on this new lightning thing goes pretty fast, but finally she gets a little over-zealous and fries a trashcan.  It sort of melts and warps in on itself, and a nasty smell starts to rise from it.  Once she’s reassured herself that it’s not going to catch fire, she decides that discretion is the better part of valour – she scarpers before anyone comes looking.

As she walks home, she realises she has plenty of reasons to be happier than she has been in weeks.  For one thing, she feels a hell of a lot safer; her enhanced senses were useful, sure, but she now has an offensive power – and _damn_ if it’s not way cooler than her taser.  So she’s feeling pretty badass, and not nearly as afraid.

_Bring it, HYDRA._

And of course, she’s got wonderful people looking out for her.  In Steve, she’s found the brother she never knew she was missing.  He’s relaxed around her a lot, although she still enjoys wringing blushes from him as often as possible with her language and her innuendo, much to Bucky’s delight.  Between the two of them, Steve’s new permanent colouring is red.  But he accepts it all with good humour and takes it in his stride, claiming he’s the only civilised one of the three of them, and they need him to keep them in check. 

From the stories he tells her of all the crazy things Bucky has done to impress women, she thinks he may have a point.  Those stories always lead to tales of the double dates Bucky’s dragged Steve on, and all the humiliating ways in which Steve’s been rejected.  She would feel sorry for him, but there’s not a trace of self-pity in his voice, just a matter-of-face acceptance that this is the way things are: Bucky is the handsome one, the one all the girls want, and he is the spare.

Darcy sees his endless patience as he tries to teach her to draw (despite her utter lack of artistic skills), his enthusiasm as he waves newspapers in the air for hours on end to earn a pittance, the focussed attention he gives her when she’s talking, and she feels a choking wave of anger against everyone in his life who’s ever made him feel worthless.

 _But,_ she smirks, as she thinks of the black-and-white photo of Captain America in her history textbook, _he’ll show them all, someday._   Then she has to banish those thoughts because even though she can’t remember _all_ the details, she does know Captain America never made it to the end of the war.  So she stops thinking about World War II and serums and planes and she focuses on _her_ Steve, here and now, alive and present, and persuades herself that there’s a chance she made a big mistake, and _Steve Rogers, artist_ , isn't _Steve Rogers, war hero_.  The giant heart and stupid courage are just a coincidence.

And then there’s Bucky.

She can’t deny that she’s been attracted to him from day one.  She loves his humour, his snark – a perfect counterpoint to her own.  He’s never offended by her foul mouth; on the contrary, her language draws deep laughs from him that reverberate in her bones.  It certainly doesn’t hurt that he’s the epitome of tall, dark and panty-droppingly handsome.  She has no idea how a man with ice-blue eyes manages to make said eyes _smoulder_ , but Bucky seems to have cracked it.  And he’s taken every opportunity to unleash the full power of his smoulder on her over the past three weeks.

So yeah, she’s pretty sure Bucky’s noticed her… assets… as much as she’s noticed his, but… whenever she lets herself consider all the possibilities of giving in to their mutual attraction, it’s not thoughts of the 21st Century and Jane and her grandmother that hold her back.  Instead, it’s Steve’s stories of Bucky’s womanising that weigh heavy in her mind.

Her steps falter on the concrete.  _So I'm somehow not all that bothered by the idea that I may never make it back to 2011, but the possibility of being just a new notch in Bucky’s belt is unbearable?_  She snorts and picks up her pace again.  _Yeah, I'm so fucked._

She’s so absorbed in her thoughts as she walks that she doesn’t come out of her reverie until she sees a familiar street up ahead, and realises she has gone right past the apartment and on to the street where she first arrived in this century.  With a surprised jolt, she turns around and hurries away as inconspicuously as possible.

Her wanderings have taken her so far afield that it’s getting dark by the time she makes it home, and she hopes her boys were too caught up with work to make it back before her and find her missing – she hates making them worry.  As she pushes her key into the lock, she keeps her mind firmly on what she’ll say if they’re already there.  For now, she chooses to ignore the voice telling her to think about the fact that she just called the apartment home, even in the privacy of her own head, and the fact that she has her own key.

She hasn’t even turned her key before the door is wrenched open to reveal Bucky, shoes on and hat in hand, who almost barrels straight into her in his hurry.  He stops himself just in time, however, and catches her as she stumbles backwards.

“Darcy!” he cries, dragging her back into the apartment and slamming the door behind her.

She has just enough time to gasp out, “Whoa, where’s the fire?” before he’s enveloped her in a tight hug.  She freezes momentarily, then gives in to the urge to wrap her arms around his back.

Darcy has always liked to show her affection physically.  Steve and Bucky picked up on this pretty quickly after she arrived, and happily reciprocated, so she hasn’t been touch-starved.  This is, however, the first real hug she’s had in weeks.  They’ve been an emotionally exhausting three weeks, so she feels she’s well-overdue a good cuddle, and feels no shame in squeezing Bucky hard.  It is, however, somewhat embarrassing when she bursts into tears and soaks Bucky’s shirt.

Bucky jerks in surprise and the next thing she knows, he’s leading her over to the couch and pulling her in to his side, and a handkerchief is being pressed into her hand.  She thinks it’s given to her by Steve, but she can’t really see through her tears.  She sobs out her sadness, her happiness, her fear, and most importantly, her confusion.  When she eventually calms down and returns to her senses, someone has removed her glasses and set them on the low coffee table, a warm mug is in her hands, and Steve and Bucky are saying something.  She lifts the mug to her face and breathes deeply.  It’s cocoa, hot and sweet, and after a few fortifying sips, she tunes in to her friends’ voices.

“…happened, got back and you weren’t here –”

“I swear to God, if somebody hurt you –”

“Calm down, Buck, we don’t know that –”

“Well, why is she cryin’, then, huh?”

Bucky’s voice has devolved into a growl, and though Steve’s tone is gentle and reasonable, even he can’t keep out the hard edge – concern, and maybe even anger.  The thought of even mild-mannered Steve getting angry on her behalf, even without knowing what’s wrong, makes her smile.  Seeing her face, the boys break off and stare at her expectantly.

“I’m fine,” she soothes, and means it.  “No one hurt me, I was just a little… overwhelmed.  But really, everything’s fine.”

Steve relaxes back into the couch in relief, but Bucky doesn’t look convinced.

“You sure, doll?  We got back an’ you weren’t here, an’ then it was gettin’ dark, an’ we thought…”

“I know.  I know, I'm sorry, I didn’t mean to make you worry, I was at the library and I lost track of time.”  She filters out the more… _electrifying_ details of her afternoon.  She hasn’t told her boys about her powers, and for the moment, she’d rather keep it that way.  If HYDRA ever came knocking, God forbid, she’d rather they didn’t even have to feign ignorance.  Bucky may be a natural-born liar, but she’s not sure Steve could pull it off – his adorable, innocent act only works because he is, in fact, innocent.  Of everything.  She’s pretty sure he’s never even squashed an ant.

“Doll, we’ve talked about this before.  You know how dangerous the city can be at night.  Please, _please_ don’t go wanderin’ around after dark.”  Clearly, Bucky isn’t letting this go.  Well, fuck him.  She’s an independent woman – and one with _powers_ at that – and she’s not going to let him get away with this chauvinistic male bullsh–

Her protests die on her lips when she meets his gaze.  She looks from him to Steve, and back again.  Wow.  They were _really_ worried about her.  Any indignation she was feeling falls away, replaced with a now-familiar wave of emotion.  Against all odds, she seems to have stumbled upon the two people in this city who will always have her back, no matter what.  So, instead of shouting at Bucky, she decides to reassure them both instead.

“Guys, I _know_ you’re worried about me.  I _know_ you care, and that makes me happier than I can ever tell you.  But you have to trust that I know what I'm doing.  I promise I’ll be more careful in future, but the fact is, sometimes I might have to go out at night.”  She tries to make her voice as kind as possible, and pours all her gratitude into her words.

“But –” Steve and Bucky begin at the same time.

Darcy holds up a hand to silence them.  “No.  We never know what might happen in the future, and I never make promises I don’t know if I can keep.  But I want you both to know this: if, for any reason, I _do_ have to go somewhere dangerous – and I'm not saying I will, just that I _might_ – I can take care of myself.”

They both frown, and she can tell they’re thinking of the dashing rescue they had to pull off the first time they met her.  She cringes internally.  She knows that back then she needed their help, and she thanks her lucky stars that they gave it, but she’s always hated the very idea of a damsel in distress.  Now that she’s had her first taste of power, even though it was only a few hours ago, she doesn’t think she could ever go back to that utter helplessness that she felt in that alley, faced with two men stronger than her, and without her taser.

She pins them with her there’s-something-I-can’t-tell-you-and-I-need-you-to-trust-me-and-not-ask-questions stare, which she’s perfected recently.  “I _promise_ you,” she says, and her voice is laden with meaning, “I am not as helpless as I was.”

Steve and Bucky’s expressions relax into the mixture of understanding, curiosity and concern that they always show when she alludes to the secrets she’s keeping.  But the concern is a little more prominent than it usually is, and the idea of them worrying about her, not knowing where she is or if she’s ok, makes her heart ache.

Shaking off her gloom, she stands up with a sunny smile.  “So,” she says, heading into the kitchen, “I believe I owe you boys a meal?”

 

Dinner passes in the usual blur of chatter, laughter, flirting (from Darcy and Bucky) and blushing (from Steve).  Bucky recounts the latest bawdy jokes from the men down at the docks, and Darcy guffaws while Steve sighs. He’s long given up on trying to get Bucky to treat Darcy “like a lady”.  Coming from anyone else, such a suggestion would have been met with a feminist tirade about arbitrary gender roles, but Steve is so fucking respectful in everything he does, it never even occurred to Darcy to be angry.  They ask about Darcy’s day, and she tells them she’s been researching Norse mythology just to see their confusion, but before she can be too amused they rightly chalk it up as one of those things she can’t tell them about and move on.  Then Steve asks how Darcy’s sewing lessons with Sarah are going, and she’s partway through gushing about the dress they’re working on together when she remembers something she’s been wanting to ask Bucky for a while.

“Bucky, did we ever tell you how we got such a big discount on my dresses from Martha?”  She looks at Steve out the corner of her eye as she speaks, and he stiffens a little.  Oh, yes, he knows where she’s going with this.

“I thought it was ‘cause Martha’s an old friend’a Sarah’s?”  Bucky’s puzzled.

“Yeah, there was that… and then there was Steve’s _aw, shucks_ look.”

“Oh?”  Understanding lights Bucky’s eyes, but he continues anyway – he gets even more joy out of needling Steve than she does.  The little shit.  “Describe this look.”

“Oh, you know – hands in pockets, big eyes, shy smile.  Innocent as you please, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.”

“I see.  And you believe that this… _aw, shucks_ look was fiscally beneficial?”  Bucky’s really getting into it now, and eyeing a slowly reddening Steve as he speaks.

“Definitely.  You should have seen it, Bucky, Martha just _melted_ over how adorable he was, and we got _the best_ service ever.  She even threw in a few items for free.”

“Well, well, that _is_ good…for us, anyway.  But I have to ask, did Steve _know_ what an effect he was havin’ on this sweet ole lady?”  Bucky’s tone turns mockingly stern.

“It is my firm belief, Mr Barnes, that Mr Rogers _absolutely_ knew what he was doing.  The poor woman never knew what hit her.”  Darcy shakes her head ruefully.

“Well, I never.  Who woulda thought, eh, Miss Lewis?  I woulda never expected such behaviour from our young Mr Rogers here.”

“Indeed, Mr Barnes.  And he was always such a _good_ boy.”

“It’s a tragedy.  How the youth of today have fallen.”

“Scandalous,” Darcy says, as Steve begins to vibrate with embarrassment.

“Shockin’,” Bucky replies, and they did all this to make Steve squirm, but _damn_ if that Brooklyn accent and the way he’s playing along with her don’t do funny things to _her_ heart rate.

“Shameful.”

“Downright criminal.”

“ _You_ taught it to me!” Steve finally bursts, unable to contain his indignation any longer.  Darcy and Bucky collapse on the table laughing as steam practically shoots out of Steve’s ears.

“I knew it!” Darcy crows.  “I _knew_ it!”

Eventually, when they’ve all got their breath back, Bucky explains how he had noticed when they were children how many adults found Steve endearing, and had dragged Steve into a number of experiments to figure out the perfect combination of body language and facial expressions to get them out of almost any sticky situation.  And then proceeded to drag Steve into said sticky situations.  Steve’s puppy-dog eyes have come in handy over the years, but he clearly feels guilty about what he considers deception.  Darcy watches her boys argue about the ethics of some of the scrapes they’ve gotten into in the past, her chin resting on her hand, and she can easily see how they’re best friends.  Bucky planted a tiny spark of mischief in Steve the day they met, but despite his best efforts ever since to fan it into a flame, it’s remained a tiny ember.  Just bright enough to have fun, and occasionally tease Bucky and Darcy just as badly as they do him, but not enough to ever compromise his unbelievably pure _goodness._

As Steve splutters his embarrassment, Bucky’s mirth-filled eyes flit to Darcy’s, unreservedly inviting her into their joke, into their friendship.

And for the hundredth time that evening, Darcy’s heart clenches painfully.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy talks to Steve and Bucky about what she's contributing to the household.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This update isn't all that long, but I reached a point that seemed like a good stopping place and decided to quit while I was ahead.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has left kudos and bookmarked, and thanks for all the comments and feedback. It really means a lot.

The next day, Darcy wakes up early, as usual.  She makes breakfast, as usual, and jokes with Steve and Bucky while they eat, as usual.  She waves them goodbye, as usual, then heads off to a new library for research and to find somewhere to practice using her powers.  As usual.

By the time she’s made it home and is making dinner so it’ll be ready when the boys get back, she’s had a busy day – _as usual_ – and yet she’s feeling restless.  Taking the potatoes off the stove, she sets them down on the counter and surveys the apartment critically.

It really is tiny.  The kitchen is more of a kitchenette, and is one room with the living area, which consists of the small couch she sleeps on, a low, battered coffee table, and a fireplace.  The radio rests on the mantelpiece, looking so worn it might crumble to dust at the slightest touch.  There are only three other rooms: Steve and Bucky’s bedrooms, and the bathroom.  The floors are wood, covered as much as possible by tatty rugs, and the window overlooking the street has a damaged frame and doesn’t quite shut properly. It’s going to be cold in the autumn, and she doesn’t want to think about the winter.

It’s miniscule.  It’s pathetic.

It’s home, and she loves it.

But it was barely enough for two people and now there are three of them – and she’s not delusional enough to think that an easy ride home is suddenly going to pop up out of nowhere.  Which is a little ironic, considering how she was dropped here with no warning.  But it’s true: despite all her research, and her progress with her powers, she’s still no closer to achieving time travel.  And if Janey hasn’t already figured something out, well… Darcy could be waiting a long time.  She’s beginning to think that she might have to make it to the 21st Century the old-fashioned way.

Strangely, the prospect doesn’t make her panic.

The door clicks open and the boys tumble through, Bucky with his left arm wrapped around Steve’s neck, and his right hand rubbing his knuckles into his scalp.  Steve is so small, Bucky doesn’t even need to push him down to reach the top of his head.  Both are laughing, and it’s so infectious that she smiles, even though she doesn’t know what the joke is.

Darcy gives the apartment one last cursory glance, then turns her attention back to their dinner.  She can’t help but muse over the contents of the food cupboards, and the decision she has been coming to slowly now solidifies in her mind.

And so, on June 25th 1940 (she reads the date from the newspaper in Bucky’s hands using her new super-vision), she sets down the gloves she’s making herself to cover her not-tattoo (or Helm, as she’s taken to calling it in her head) and arranges her features into her “I-will-not-be-denied” expression.  She’s found this face to be very useful when dealing with Steve and Bucky, who have before now tried to block her from doing the cooking and sewing up the holes in their clothes. It’s as though they’re trying to treat her like a guest, which irritates her for some reason.

“I’m going to get a job,” she announces.

Steve looks concerned and takes a seat on the couch next to Bucky, who raises his head from his paper – Steve get one for free because of his job – and cocks an eyebrow at her.

“A job,” Bucky repeats.  “Why do you need a job?”

“Ok, so here’s the thing.  I know you guys have, like, a million questions about me – and you haven't asked them.  For which I am so, so grateful – mostly because I have no fucking clue what answers I could give you without you whacking me over the head and dragging me off to the nearest nuthouse.”

Steve frowns.  “We would never hurt you, Darcy.  Surely you know that?”

Bucky nods enthusiastically.  “Absolutely not.  An’ we’d never let anyone else get to you, either.”

“If anyone _did_ try an’ hurt you –”

“An’ God help anyone who tries –”

“Yeah, that would be a real bad idea –”

“’Cause they’d have all _three_ ’a us ta deal with –”

“I know, I know,” she interrupts hastily, before things can spiral any further.  She feels suddenly guilty.  Of _course_ they would never betray her like that.  But they probably would struggle to believe her, and then she’d have to show them her powers to prove her point, and then they’d know too much, and then HYDRA might –

She cuts herself off before she can delve too deeply into _that_ distressing line of thought.  “I was exaggerating.  Anyway, that’s not the point,” she adds, trying to get the conversation back on track.  “The point is, I don’t think it’s gonna be possible for me to return… to where I came from.  Not in the foreseeable future, anyhow.  So I'm stuck here for the time being.  But I don’t have any money, and I can’t keep freeloading off you guys forever, it’s really not fair to –”

“You’re leavin’ us?”  Bucky cuts in before she can finish.  “I know you worry abou’ bein’ a burden, but – Steve, tell ‘er she’s not a burden!”

“You’re really not, Darcy.  We love havin’ you he–”

“You really don’ have to leave, besides, where would you go?  Even if you started earnin’ tomorr–”

“You do so much for us already, if you’re worried about tha–”

“Guys!  Stop!” Darcy practically shouts.  “You're doing the thing again!”  She glares at them.  She loves them, she really does, but they’re so exasperating sometimes.  They have a habit – not of _finishing_ each other’s sentences, as might be expected from friends who have been together so long – but of both trying to say the same thing at the same time.  While talking over each other.  And getting louder and louder.  She’s seen it directed at her several times recently.  It happened when she wanted to stay on the couch, and when she insisted on cooking every meal, and when she suggested she cut her hair after she clogged up the shower drain for the third time.

God, that had been disgusting.

But when she had brought up the subject of lopping off her curls, both boys had cried “NO!” much louder than she thought strictly necessary.  Then they proceeded to tell her, in steadily rising voices, how beautiful her hair was, how much it suited her, how soft it was, and how no girl in Brooklyn was as gorgeous as she was with her hair down.  She thought that last one was Bucky, but it had been getting hard to tell.

It’s the only argument she’s yet lost.

“Darcy?  You ok, doll?”

Bucky’s concerned voice breaks into Darcy’s thoughts, and she realises she’s fallen silent in her trip down memory lane.  Also, she thinks her face may be a little pink.  Though it can’t possibly be as red as it had gone at the time, under Bucky’s unbearably intense gaze.

“Fine, just fine.”  Her voice comes out a little higher than she intended, and she clears her throat before continuing.  “As I was saying, since I’ll be here indefinitely, I need to help out – and I mean _financially_ ,” she insists, as they open their mouths to protest again.

They both slump back on the couch in obvious relief, and she’s overcome with affection.  Bucky and Steve are always so free, so open with their emotions – so when they tell her they _want_ her, she has no reason to doubt them.  And want her they do: they’ve made it very clear since she arrived that they aren’t just being good Samaritans.  Steve and Bucky genuinely care for her.  They’re _happy_ she’s here.  The knowledge makes her almost uncomfortably gooey inside, and for a moment, despite being lost, hunted, and iPod-less, she’s never felt safer.

Her attention has drifted again, and she makes an effort to re-focus on the conversation.  At least this time she isn't blushing.  And she definitely didn’t just surreptitiously wipe away a tear.

Bucky’s asking her what kind of work she wants to get, and she realises she has no idea.  _Great.  Excellent forward planning, Darce._

“Well, what can you do?  What have you done in the past?”  Ah, Steve.  Ever the voice of reason.

She thinks about it for a minute.  She did some waitressing during school, but it’s not ideal now – the hours are too long for too little pay, and she wants to still have time left over for her research and practice.  Besides, she doesn’t want to deal with pervy customers, and she has a feeling the service industry in 1940 doesn’t have stellar anti-sexual harassment policies.  If anybody tried anything with her, it would be unpleasant, and she couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t fry them.  Not to mention, she doesn’t have the money to bail Steve and Bucky out of jail if they ever found out someone had tried to hurt her.  The thought makes her smile despite herself.

Darcy wrenches her thoughts away from imaginary perverts and back to her skills.  The ones that _don’t_ involve lightning.  With Jane and Erik, her official duties mostly amounted to data entry – but that involved computers, which haven't been invented yet.  She doesn’t think.   When was the first computer invented again?  Ironically, she wishes she could Google it to find out.  Either way, flogging her technological abilities is off the cards.  Which leaves…

“I take care of people who are incapable of – or unwilling to – take care of themselves.”  Memories return of hours spent trying to get her scientists to eat something, anything, even if it was just a pop tart.  And getting them to wash.  Once she actually bodily dragged Jane into a bath.  The genius didn’t even seem to notice what was going on until Darcy turned the water on and sprayed her fully-clothed friend.  “I feed them, and make sure they shower, and sleep, and get some fresh air and sunlight…”

“You mean like a nanny?”

Darcy blinks at Steve.  Then she bursts out laughing.  There really was no difference between scientists and children, after all.  Well, except for IQ, anyway.

Getting herself back under control, she sees Steve giving Bucky bewildered “what did I say?” eyes.  “Sorry.  Sorry.  I – ahem.  Yes, I suppose you could call it nannying.  Either of you boys know any children who need taking care of?”

“Not offa the top’a my head, no,” Bucky replies thoughtfully, “but there’s always rich folk lookin’ to foist their kids off on other people.  I’ll ask around at the docks, see if anybody knows someone – or knows someone who knows someone…”

“An’ I can ask my regulars,” Steve adds.  “We’ll find you somethin’, don’t worry, Darcy.”

Darcy beams at her boys, touched at their readiness to help.  It’s only later, as she’s pulling the blankets up over herself on the couch, that she realises that Steve and Bucky have managed to take a task she set for herself, and make it their own mission.  She has a brief flash of worry over how quickly she’s let these boys into her life, how easy she finds it to trust them and how much she’s relying on them.  She’s always been pretty independent, and always hated the idea of other people doing things for her, and she shouldn’t be making exceptions now to rules she’s held all her life.  What would her grandmother say if she could see her now, letting a couple of near strangers find work for her?

But they’re not strangers.  They’re _Steve and Bucky_.  She remembers the horror on their faces when they thought she would move out, and the relief when she told them she was staying.  It’s fortunate she’s lying down, because the giddy rush of happiness that fills her at the memory could knock her off her feet.

As her limbs grow heavy, a thought flashes through her tired, hazy mind that she won’t remember tomorrow.  Which is probably a good thing, since she’s not quite ready to deal with the implications of this thought just yet.

 _There’s a difference_ , she muses as sleep claims her, _between being dependent on the kindness of strangers, and accepting help from people who love you._


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy gets a job. Thanks to PoppyseedPomphrey for some inspiration! This chapter is for you.

Darcy sits in the opulent parlour room and sips nervously at her tea.  When Bucky said that a lot of rich people wanted nannies for their kids, she had been so focussed on the _nanny_ part, she hadn't given a lot of thought to the _rich_ part.  The mansion she finds herself in now – and mansion is really the only word for it – is fucking _huge_.  Sprawling, perfectly manicured lawns, bird topiary, marble steps and gleaming statues make up the garden – or rather, _gardens_ , plural.  And now that she thinks about it, the mansion itself actually looks a bit like a castle, with its stone walls and latticed bay windows and _spires_.

It only took a couple of days to find the Markos family.  Steve spoke to one of his regular customers, a matronly, middle-aged lady with a soft spot for Steve (no surprises there – most people have a soft spot for Steve) and a proclivity for expensive hats.  Not tasteful hats, just expensive ones.  Barbara turned out to be the nouveau riche cliché: married to a tailor’s son who had made a fortune on the stock market thanks to a bit of economic know-how (and no small amount of sheer dumb luck), she bought luxuries because they _cost_ a lot, and spent her time trying to wrangle her way into the social circles of the upper classes.  She knew a lady, who knew a gentleman, who knew another gentleman, whose wife knew Sharon Marko.

Recently remarried, Sharon was looking for a nanny to take care of her eight-year-old son, Charles, and her eleven-year-old stepson, Cain, while she and her husband were off doing… whatever it is rich people do with their time.  Darcy hasn’t figured out what that is, yet.  They’re certainly not working.

Darcy casts another look around the parlour and suppresses a wince.  The décor is abundant, but fairly tasteful, she supposes.  It’s the obvious wealth that she finds headache-inducing.  She knows little to nothing about art, but there’s what she’s pretty sure is a genuine, original Monet hanging over the fireplace.

She was confused, at first, when a shiny black car had pulled up outside their crumbling apartment block, driven by a curt, unsmiling man in his fifties, to bring her to the mansion in Westchester.  The journey took an hour and a half – Darcy doubts they’ll send her a car every day, and she’s not sure how she’ll get to there without it.  It’s looking like she’ll have to reject this offer based on geography.  But she’s here now, so she may as well enjoy the tea and hear what Sharon has to say.

“So, Miss Lewis –”

“Please, call me Darcy,” Darcy cuts in, then takes another sip to hide her horror.  Interrupting a potential employer is never a good idea.

But Sharon smiles, and it’s surprisingly warm.  “Then you must call me Sharon.  Darcy, I am told you have prior experience with childcare?”

Darcy grimaces internally.  Until now, there’s been an element of Chinese Whispers in her communications with Sharon, and she expected to have this kind of problem.  “Not childcare, exactly,” she says carefully, “but I do have plenty of experience taking care of… _difficult_ personalities.”

It may be her imagination, but Sharon seems to brighten slightly.  “My sons are… unique, shall we say, Darcy.  I am very busy and cannot be home to take care of them.  We do have servants, but their skills do not include childcare, and our previous nannies – well.”  Sharon lifts her teacup to her lips.  Darcy takes the opportunity to really study the woman for the first time.  Upon arrival, the housekeeper had brought Darcy to the parlour, where Sharon had stood and greeted Darcy politely, if a little coldly.  Darcy didn’t take offense; everything about the woman screamed ‘expensive breeding’ and she was just glad for the courtesy.  Initially, Sharon had seemed like a rich stereotype: blonde hair in a tight chignon, beautifully tailored dress fitting perfectly to her straight-backed form, she was self-possessed and well-spoken.  She had a quietly confident bearing that could only come from an upbringing of wealth and privilege.  Her poise seemed inborn, natural, unshakeable.

But as Darcy inspects the woman more closely, she sees the single finger tapping almost imperceptibly on her knee, and the tense set of her shoulders.  Something is bothering Sharon, and Darcy is willing to bet it’s her children.

“The others didn’t take to the boys?”

Sharon’s eyes snap back to Darcy’s and she lowers her teacup.  “No.  No, I suppose they didn’t.”  She sounds relieved not to have to explain.  “Not at all, actually.”  Her eyes flick downwards again.

Deciding Sharon needs a push, Darcy tries to frame her next question as diplomatically as possible.  “Has there been… bad behaviour?”  There.  That was good.  Impersonal, but to the point.

Sharon, however, doesn’t seem to agree.  “Miss Lewis, I assure you, my son is perfectly well-behaved.”  She doesn’t snap; she’s too well-bred for that.  But Darcy can hear the warning tone in her voice, and knows she needs to appease her before Sharon shuts her down completely.  She registers the renewed use of her surname, and ‘my son’, singular.  Sharon seemed determined to treat her stepson as her own, but apparently her subconscious hasn’t got the message.

“My apologies, Sharon, I meant no offence.  But children are prone to mischief, and that can be off-putting to some.  But a nanny should be prepared for that…”  She trails off, hoping Sharon will take it as an invitation to explain.

Seemingly mollified, Sharon nods.  “Naturally.  And it is true that Cain is more… _prone to mischief_ than most children.”  Her lips twist slightly in a sneer, and Darcy wonders if she’s aware she’s doing it.  Clearly, she has no problem throwing her stepson under the bus, and Darcy files Cain under the ‘troublemaker’ column in her mind before Sharon continues.  “But as you would expect, they were able to deal with him, if mildly frustrated.  Charles, however,” here her expression turns at once affectionate and exasperated, “is an angel of a boy.  But he is a little strange.  His teachers tell me he is gifted.”

“Gifted?”

“The exact term the used… was genius.”

Darcy almost bursts out laughing.  Now she can see why the previous nannies were scared away by the ‘angel’ rather than Cain.  If Charles is anything like her own geniuses…. Apparently, the universe is sending her a message.  Only the tentative expression on Sharon’s face forces her to rein her amusement in.

“Sharon, I think Charles and I are going to get along like a house on fire.”

It’s the wrong thing to say.

Sharon pales.  “Darcy, Charles means well, but, well, there have been incidents…”

“He almost burned the house down, didn’t he?”

“More than once.”  Sharon seems surprised, both at Darcy’s understanding and her own admission.

Darcy smiles serenely.  “I assure you, I am uniquely qualified to take care of your son.”

Sharon looks both relieved and unconvinced at the same time.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

They agree on a trial period, because although Darcy’s confident she can handle Charles, at least, she’s not so sure about Cain.  She gets the feeling Sharon was understating things when she talked about Cain’s behaviour.

The driver from earlier is recalled to take Darcy home.  Shifting uncomfortably, Darcy turns to look at Sharon as they stand on the steps outside the mansion.  She’s touched that her new maybe-employer has chosen to see her out personally, rather than just dismissing her.  It shows a measure of respect Darcy hadn't dared hope for, and makes her next question a little easier to ask.

“Um, Sharon?  About the journey, it’s a long way to Westchester from Brooklyn, and I’m not in a position to move –”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, dear,” Sharon replies with a dismissive wave of her hand.  “I’ll send Donald to pick you up and drop you home.”

Darcy gapes a little.  “Every – every day?”

Sharon looks at Darcy like she’s questioning her sanity.  “Yes, every day.  How else are you supposed to get here?”

“Right, right, of course.  Thanks, then, I guess – yes, thank you.  That’s, uh, very generous,” Darcy babbles, stumbling down the steps as she tries to move towards the car and keep her eyes on Sharon at the same time.  Sharon has apparently reached her limit on dealing with peasants for the day, though, and gives her a curt nod, before turning and walking back into the house without another word.

 _Wow,_ Darcy thinks, _my own chauffeur.  They must really need a nanny._   Before Donald can open the back door for her, she folds herself into the front seat.  If she’s going to be spending three hours a day in a car with the man, she’s determined to try and build some sort of friendly relationship with him.  Maybe she’ll crack that slab of granite he calls a face and get him to smile.  As she settles into the leather, she glances out the rear window at the row of identical black cars lined up outside the house.  _Then again,_ she muses, _maybe it’s not desperation.  They certainly seem to have the cars to spare.  Drivers, too, I’d bet._

It’s simple enough to get Donald talking on their way home.  All she has to do is ask him plenty of questions about himself, his family, his hometown.  He’s only too happy to open up once she gets him talking, presumably because he’s so used to having entitled snobs in his car.  He turns out to be a real sweetheart, and she feels guilty for her less-than-charitable thoughts about his stony facial expressions.  Pulling up right outside her apartment block, he gives her a cheery wave, and tells her he’ll pick her up at 8 am tomorrow.

“Ouch,” she replies.  “I don’t even want to think about how early that means you’ll have to be up.”

Snorting, he rolls up the window and drives away.  She watches him go with a smile on her face.  Suddenly, she hopes fervently that her first experience with Charles and Cain goes well – the job seems right up her alley, and she’s looking forward to spending more time with Donald.

Keys in hand, she makes her way up the stairs, mentally listing her reasons to be happy.  It’s a habit she’s got into recently to keep her grounded, remind her how lucky she is, how much worse things could be.  It goes something like this:

  1. Bucky and Steve
  2. An apartment
  3. Food
  4. Kickass Norse powers (taser no longer necessary)



Humming happily to herself, she tentatively adds _number 5: potential employment_ to the bottom of the list.  Yes, indeed, she has plenty of reasons to be grateful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's been a really lovely response to this fic, and I'm so grateful for all your comments. Please keep reading, and I'll try and get the next update to you soon!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy meets Charles and Cain for the first time, and overcomes a crisis of confidence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So last chapter I introduced the idea of Darcy as a nanny for Charles Xavier and Cain Marko, and it seems you guys really like the idea. There's lots of speculation in the comments as to what Darcy's relationship with Charles is going to be like, and what young Charles is like. Well, I have some ideas about what I want to do with him now. I don't want to give anything away, but we'll be getting into Charles as a character, probably next chapter, and hopefully it's going to be interesting!
> 
> Thank you all for your comments, I love reading them, and your speculation often sparks ideas about characters, character development and plot development. Even if you don't see your idea specifically come up in the story, the likelihood is you inspired me in some way!
> 
> Thanks again to PoppyseedPomphrey for the original Charles inspiration.

Darcy taps her foot apprehensively in the car on the long drive to Westchester.  It occurred to her sometime last night, in between telling her boys about the interview and basking in their grins and encouraging words, that she hadn't been asked for any qualifications.  Isn't it normal for a rich family to want… something more from their nannies?  Shouldn’t she be a nanny/bodyguard, or a nanny/governess?  Why didn’t Sharon ask her if she spoke a second language, or press her for more details about her experience?  The only answer she’s been able to come up with is particularly disconcerting: that there is something so disturbing about the boys she’ll be looking after, that every _proper_ nanny has run screaming, and Sharon is really being forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

It doesn’t bode well for her chances and she’s growing more and more uneasy as they draw nearer their destination.  Donald is shooting her concerned looks, and she thinks maybe her last few responses didn’t make any sense.  That’ll happen when one person stops paying any attention to the conversation.

She really needs to pull it together.

Closing her eyes, she brings up another memory from last night: Bucky talking her down after she worked herself almost to a panic attack over the issue.

_“Doll,” he caught her chin in his hand, “doll, look at me.  Breathe.  Everythin’ll be fine.”_

_“Nope,” she said, still hyperventilating.  “Nope.  I’m gonna mess up.  I've bitten off more than I can chew.  Those boys are gonna eat me alive, I just know it.  Why should I have any better luck than a_ proper _nanny?  I’ll fail and I’ll be fired and I won’t ever find another job and I’ll die penniless and alone –”_

 _“_ Darcy _!  Woah, doll, slow down!”  Bucky ran his hands over her shoulders, down her arms, and tangled his fingers with hers.  “You are the smartest, bravest dame I've ever met, and two little boys are_ not _gonna get the better of you.  In fact…”  He tilted his head down towards hers, and she could feel his breath brushing warm across her lips.  “Those boys are gonna love you.”  His forehead came to rest against hers.  “Just like we did.”_

Darcy keeps her eyes closed in the car, savouring the memory.  Bucky’s a monumental flirt; while she’s never seen him in action, it’s hard to miss the lidded looks he gets from the women in the neighbourhood, even when she’s standing right next to him.  Not to mention, Steve’s told her all the stories.  They’re always funny – at least, the way Steve tells them – but they bring on a twinge in her stomach she can’t shake, and the knowing gleam in Steve’s eye that he can’t quite conceal frustrates her.  Thanks to Bucky’s reputation, she’s tried not to take his attentions seriously, but it’s getting harder and harder, and she almost reached her limit last night.  He was trying to comfort her, she knew, but then it turned into something else, and he really _didn’t_ helped her slow her breathing.  A fact he was fully aware of, if the grin was anything to go by.  Bastard.

“Darcy.”

Darcy’s eyes open at the sound of Donald’s voice, and a glance out the window reveals the mansion, which seems to have grown in size since yesterday.  Donald’s sympathetic expression is kind, but is doing nothing to ease her nerves.

 _I’ve got this,_ she tells herself, thinking of Bucky’s faith in her.  The knot in her stomach unwinds, just a little.

 _Cain: 11, badly behaved,_ she recites internally as she makes her way up the unending stone steps towards the front door.  _Just need to show him I won’t take any of his shit.  I can do that.  Did it all through school._ Another step, then another, then another.  One foot in front of the other.  _Charles: 8, little angel, little genius, little…strange._ She reaches the front door.  The housekeeper, Ellen, smiles at her.  _Sounds just like Jane._ She feels her lips curve upwards in response.  _Yeah.  I’ve got this._

Her muscles relax, her breathing steadies, her shoulders straighten, and she walks through the door and into the entrance hall, where Sharon stands, flanked by two young boys.

As soon as she meets the eyes of the taller boy, she knows she was right to project confidence.

His hair is russet-coloured and wild, and his thick eyebrows are drawn together in a scowl above dark green eyes.  His mouth is set in a hard line, and his square jaw is clenched.  Belligerence rolls off him in waves, and she guesses this must be Cain.  He’s bigger than she expected; if it weren’t for the immaturity in his expression and his tense, folded arms, she’d have guessed he was closer to fourteen than eleven.

The other boy, by contrast, is surveying her with intelligent, round brown eyes, that seem to convey both complete innocence and a wisdom and understanding equal to her grandmother’s.  A thin, birdlike face makes him look vulnerable and fragile, completely at odds with the strength in his gaze.

His clothes are dishevelled, his dark blond hair sticks out at odd angles, and his fingers are smudged with ink.  _Yep, definitely a Jane._   The notion is reassuring.  The boy – _Charles_ – cocks his head at her, mouth quirking in amusement, or confusion, or both, and she frowns, puzzled.  Mischief lights up his face, and he is instantly appealing.  She wants to talk to him, to play with him, but she forces herself to turn away, towards Sharon.

“Sharon.  Lovely to see you again,” she says politely, coming forward to shake the other woman’s hand.  “How are you?”

“Very well, thank you.  Darcy, allow me to introduce my sons, Charles and Cain.”  She gestures at the small boy then the big one, and Darcy’s guess is confirmed.  “Darlings, this is Darcy, your new –”

“Jailor,” Cain interrupts, his scowl deepening, if that’s even possible.

“Cain!” Sharon exclaims, though she sounds more resigned than shocked, like she’s just going through the motions.

“So how long will this one last?”  Cain continues as though his stepmother hasn’t spoken.  “Two days?  One?”  He smirks.  “A couple of hours?”  His eyes rake up and down her body disdainfully, taking in her height, her clothes.  Darcy fights to remain still, not to draw herself up taller.  “She’ll go running back to her mommy as soon as she figures out what a freak Charles is.”  Here Sharon makes a small squawk, which he ignores.  “Then again, maybe not.  She looks desperate enough for the money.  Where do you even find these harlots, _Mother_?”  He spits the last word like it’s a greater insult than ‘harlot’.  Darcy wonders if this obviously spoiled, vitriolic eleven-year-old even knows the actual meaning of the term, or if he just liked the sound of it.

As Cain finishes his little speech, he stands there, smirking triumphantly at Darcy, clearly very pleased with himself.  His eyes zero in hungrily on her every movement, and she realises he’s waiting for her reaction, eager to see her break down in tears, or maybe just turn tail and flee.  Not for the first time, Darcy wonders how some males in 1940 manage to walk upright without collapsing under the weight of the staggering superiority complex they’re carrying around.  So far, she hasn’t seen any evidence that women are inherently more fragile than her 21st-Century peers, only that more people _expect_ them to be.

Well, Cain – and everyone else – are in for a nasty shock if they keep anticipating weakness from Darcy.  She’s befriended gods and bickered with secret agents.  She’s held her nerve against the Destroyer, she’s been thrown back in time, and she has _fucking superpowers_.  She’s survived working for Jane, and, most importantly, she’s survived high school.

Stepping towards Cain, she bends at the waist to bring her face closer to his eye level.  Crimson lips curving upwards, she gives him a smile, pleasant with an edge of blood-red steel.  “Hello, Cain.  It’s nice to meet you.  My name is Darcy Lewis.”  She lets a little ice bleed into her tone.  “Now, I'm going to be taking care of you for the foreseeable future, so you have two choices.  Number one: continue to be disrespectful to me, your mother, and your brother, and I really _will_ be your jailor.  Or, alternatively, number two: show some courtesy, and I will be your nanny, your friend, and your playmate.  Do I make myself clear?”

The smirk has slipped from Cain’s face, and his expression is caught in a hilarious combination of wide-eyed shock and surly glowering.  He’s apparently too stunned – or maybe just confused, it’s hard to tell right now – to respond, so she straightens with a thoughtful hum.

“Yes, well, we’ll get there,” she says with a confidence she is finally feeling completely.  Then, because she believes in treating children equally, she steps over to address Charles with the same warning, albeit with a rueful smile.  After all, he hasn’t done anything to incur her wrath.  Yet.  “Charles.  The same goes for you, of course.  So long as you kids behave yourselves, we’ll have fun.” 

Darcy’s really starting to relax now.  Why was she ever worried about a couple of little boys?  This is _nothing_ compared to a giant death-robot from outer space.  Flames and crumbling buildings and a metal monster dance through her mind as she smiles at Charles, who is looking… a little pale, actually.  He might look slightly shell-shocked, but as she peers closer, his face morphs into a grin so wide and open she swears she can hear him agreeing, even though his mouth isn't moving.

He sticks a hand out for her to shake, and once again she’s hit by the contradictory air about him: age-old maturity and eight-year-old childishness all rolled into one, skinny, rumpled, and frankly adorable package.  “A pleasure to meet you, too, Darcy.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy tries to bond with Charles and Cain - with mixed results.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More on Charles and Cain! I know a lot of you are pining for more Bucky and Steve, and I promise I haven't forgotten about our adorable trio. But for now, I'm getting Darcy settled in her new job. The boys will be back in a couple of chapters!

Sharon makes her exit shortly after, citing a need to not keep ‘the ladies’ waiting.  Darcy watches her leave, wondering what it is about ‘the ladies’ that makes them so much more compelling than her own sons.  It is a Sunday, after all.

When Darcy was growing up, no matter what her grandmother might have needed to get done, no matter who wanted to see her, Darcy’s grandma always kept Sundays free for “family time”.  She would take Darcy to the park, or the cinema – or, if she was particularly annoyed with her that day, sit her down and torture her with the basics of needlework.  But it would always be just her and Darcy.  On this point she was adamant.  As a small child, Darcy had resented it.  She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t go play with her friends – grandma was boring, and was terrible at make-believe.  Then, again, as a teenager, she had been surly.  There were more important things for a fourteen year old to be doing, things that didn’t include hanging out with a seventy-something old woman.  Still, Darcy’s grandma always had an iron will, and Sundays were very specifically reserved for the two of them.  When she was feeling less hormonal and more honest, Darcy could even admit that she loved Sundays.  Probably more than any other day of the week – even when they spent the entire day indoors, Darcy listening to music or doing homework while her grandmother read the newspaper.  In fact, it’s those days that Darcy misses the most now, the quiet afternoons in the cocoon of their tiny living room, knowing that her grandmother was _right there_ , that even though they weren’t doing anything exciting, Donna had set aside the time just for her.  All she had to do was reach out, and her grandmother’s attention would be focussed entirely on her.  There’s something of that feeling to be found in her evenings with Steve and Bucky, reading and dozing.  And in her afternoons with Sarah, listening to the radio and working on her latest dress.  The quiet clack of needles and the rustling of pages has always meant safety and warmth and _home_.

It wasn’t until she moved out that Darcy fully understood what her grandmother had done for her.  No matter what other commitments that might have kept her grandma busy, Darcy had always had Sundays to remind her that she was the centre of Donna Lewis’ world, that she was loved.  And there had been times when Donna had just known, in that instinctive way anyone who has raised a child does, that something was wrong.  On those days she would sit just a little closer, be just a little more silent, until Darcy broke and the whole sorry story came out in sobs on her grandma’s shoulder.

Darcy swallows down the lump of homesickness in her throat, burying the sudden need to cling to her grandma and tell her everything, about Jane and Thor and time travel and superpowers and HYDRA.

Tearing her eyes away from Sharon’s retreating back, she turns to the boys with what she hopes is a sunny smile.  Cain’s scowl is firmly back in place, looking carved into his face, and Charles is… giving her a sorrowful, sympathetic look.  His eyes even look a little moist.  Good God.  Have the other nannies really had so much difficulty that an eight year old is feeling sorry for her before she’s even _started_ to do her job?

“Alrighty, then,” she says breezily.  “What do you boys want to do today?”

Silence meets her question.  Charles is fidgeting slightly, like he wants to say something, or maybe… hang on.  That’s _Jane look #4_ , the one the astrophysicist gets right before she disappears for a couple of hours and things start exploding.  Better shut that down _fast_.  “Well, how about we…” she begins hastily, casting her mind about for ideas.  It’s a sunny day, they have a garden the size of several football fields, and physical activity will probably distract Charles from his pyro tendencies.  Cain might even crack a smile.  What do kids like to do?  What do _1940s_ kids like to… oh.  _Oh._

Darcy grins.

Twenty minutes later they’re on the grounds near the woods, out of the way of any of the gardener’s prize topiary or their mother’s favourite garden furniture.  Charles has a broom handle in his hand and Cain is tossing a baseball from one hand to another.  Charles informed her that they did own baseball bats, but she took one look at the pristine wood, unmarred by scuffs, and insisted it wasn’t _proper_ stickball if they used an actual bat.  Cain sulked harder, and Charles appeared baffled, but she just beamed at them until they requested an old broom from the (also baffled) housekeeper and headed outside.

The boys seem to be having fun, even though their numbers are best described as _anorexic_ : Charles and Cain have each formed teams of one, while Darcy acts as referee.  Mostly she shouts encouragement to the boys, occasionally tossing a good-natured insult their way for good measure.  She changes her allegiance on a whim, with no warning or reason.  She needs them both, Cain especially, to understand that she won’t be playing favourites.  Bad behaviour will be punished, and good behaviour rewarded, but in the meantime they’ll be treated equally.  So, for the better part of two hours, she watches the boys run and throw and bat, yelling _Faster, Cain, faster! o_ r _Almost there, Charles, keep going!_

At the beginning of the game, they introduced a couple of handicaps for Cain, to try and even the playing field a little, and although he’s still winning, Charles is holding his own.  The younger boy is obviously enjoying himself, laughing and throwing himself around more recklessly than she would have expected from a kid of his slight stature.  She’s a little worried that he’s going to hurt himself, but at least all thoughts of explosive experiments seem to have left his head, and she figures those would be far more dangerous anyway.  At least skinned knees is a peril every little boy faces.

As for Cain… well, his lips are sort of curved upwards in what could, at a stretch, be called a smile.  But she has yet to see a full-out grin, like on Charles’ face.  Still, it’s progress.  She’ll take it.

Mostly, though, it’s a relief to see the boys actually talking.  Ok, shouting insults.  Insults which aren’t _entirely_ amicable, but it’s a lot better than when they stood not looking at each other, not acknowledging the other’s presence, and only talking to her.  Other than Cain’s comment about Charles scaring away the previous nannies, neither boy had given any sign they were aware the other existed.  Until the game.

 _Stickball_ , Darcy thinks, shaking her head.  _My 1940s experience is complete_.  She looks over at the boys just in time to see Charles shooting her an odd look before he’s pounced on by his older brother, who wrestles him to the ground.

“Cheater!” Cain yells, voice rough and squeaking on the last syllable.  Darcy figures he must have hit puberty early – not only is he large for his age, but his voice appears to be breaking.  “You cheated!  You knew where I was gonna hit that ball!  You _knew_!”

Charles has made no sound, but that may have something to do with the face that his face is half-crushed into the grass, and his arm is twisted almost up behind his back.  Darcy darts forward and hauls Cain off of Charles.  It’s no mean feat, and she suspects she only manages it because he wasn’t expecting it.  The look he gives her is certainly one of surprise, the furious mask falling for a moment.

“Cain,” she says, her voice as hard and steely as it was when she told him off earlier.  This time, though, she doesn’t smile – he has to know she’s absolutely serious.  “This game is over.  Go to your room and stay there.”  She keeps her tone quiet, even.  No shouting.  She gets the feeling that won’t work with Cain.  Shrieking would imply a loss of control; he has to understand that she’s in charge.

She can only pray he’s getting the message.

To her relief, and no small amount of surprise, he turns tail and runs back towards the house.  Although, she won’t know if he’s gone to his room until she checks up on him.

A choked whimper from behind her snaps her attention back to the crumpled little boy on the ground.  Charles has curled in on himself on the grass, looking even smaller than he did before.  She crouches next to him and wipes away the silent tears trickling down his cheeks.  “Hey now, hey, hey, shhh…”  She wraps her arms around him and rocks him, crooning soothing nonsense words.  He heaves a shuddering breath, and after a few moments of stiffness that damn near break her heart, melts into her.  He tucks his head under her chin and his soft hair tickles her skin.

Darcy drops a kiss on the crown of his head and pulls back to look at him.  She gestures at his arm.  “Let me see.”  She cradles his elbow in one hand and inspects his stick-thin forearm.  The skin is a little red, and there are signs of some potential bruising.  Cain is a strong boy.  “Does it still hurt?”

There’s a brief pause, then Charles shakes his head.  Darcy smiles a little.  “You’re a brave boy.  But you can tell me if you’re in pain, ok?  I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to.  So, does your arm still hurt?”

Charles pauses again, then, in a very small voice, says, “A bit.”

Darcy presses another kiss to his temple.  “Good boy.  Ok, let’s get some ice on that, shall we?  Just to be on the safe side.  And then, I think, some lunch?”

Standing up and dusting herself off, she holds out her hand towards Charles, who looks at it blankly for a moment, uncomprehending.  Then his expression clears and he follows her lead, clambering to his feet and brushing away grass stains.  Finally, he smiles at her and wraps his fingers around hers.  Hand in hand, they make their way back down towards the mansion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed this, next chapter I'll be developing Darcy's relationship with Charles and Cain individually a little, and then it's back to Bucky and Steve.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy confronts Cain about hurting Charles, and gets a little more insight into his behaviour than she bargained for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another update! I know I've updated quite quickly lately, but I don't know if I'll be able to keep it up - I'm going to be studying for exams in August. I'll try and update as regularly as possible, though.

Darcy hands Charles off to the housekeeper, with instructions to put some ice on his arm.  She ducks down to stroke her fingers through his hair.  “I’m going to go talk to your brother, then we’ll all get some lunch, ok?”

Charles nods mutely and she gives his hair another ruffle, before straightening and asking the housekeeper directions to Cain’s room.

“Third floor,” Ellen replies.  “Second door on the right.”  She throws Darcy a dark look before adding, “Good luck.”

Darcy frowns at her in response, but refrains from making any comment.  It won’t do her any good to make an enemy of any of the house staff on her first day.  And from what she’s seen so far, it’s not surprising the servants are so unwilling to give Cain the benefit of the doubt.

So, she heads off up the stairs until she finds the door Ellen was referring to.  It’s shut tight, and there’s no sound from inside.

Darcy knocks.

No response.

She knocks again.  “Cain?  Honey, it’s Darcy.”  She’s not really sure why she uses an endearment.  Cain has been nothing but brash, unpleasant and even violent since they met a few hours earlier.  All she knows is that even as she was holding a crying Charles on the grass, she wasn’t sure which boy she felt more sorry for.

There’s still no answer from inside, and she knocks again, wondering if she’s even got the right door.  Maybe she’s talking to an empty room, looking like a madwoman.  “Cain?  Look, if you don’t answer me, I'm just gonna come in, ok?”

The silence stretches on, and she counts steadily to ten.

“Right, I'm coming in.”

Darcy pushes the door open slowly and takes a good look at the scene inside before stepping over the threshold.  Cain’s room is large, but almost entirely undecorated, without any kind of personal stamp on it.  A dull, beige wallpaper covers the walls, and a tall bookcase made of oak stands flush up against the wall closest to the door.  It’s big, but contains very few books.  She doesn’t recognise any of the titles.  At the far end of the room is a wide window, with the curtains drawn.  The bed is pushed up against the wall under the window, and Cain is sitting on it, his back to the door.  His legs are crossed under him, and his face is turned towards the closed curtains.

Darcy steps in the room, and she swears she sees Cain flinch.

Crossing over to him, she lowers herself onto the bed next to him, keeping her movements slow.  As she studies him she can see that his spine is rigid and his jaw is clenched.  He’s perfectly still, and she thinks he’s trying not to curl in on himself, or run from the room.  His posture, so carefully non-defensive, makes her ache to wrap her arms around him and pull him close.  Instead she remains perched on the edge of the bed, with about a foot of space between them.  Her fingers clasp together and she sandwiches them between her knees to resist the temptation to reach out to him.

“Cain,” she begins, her voice soft, “can you tell me why I sent you to your room?”

Silence.

“Cain?”

“You _said_ you’d be my jailor,” he spits out, sounding bitter and frustrated and completely unsurprised.

“Actually, you said it first,” Darcy bites back, then takes a deep breath.  His determination to see her as his enemy is frustrating, when all she’s done is play with him and send him inside when he attacked his brother.  But it speaks to a deeper issue – she can see that even after knowing him only half a day.

An abrupt rage grips her.  _What the hell are his parents doing?_   To look at him, a casual observer would think him much older than eleven – but a closer look quickly reveals the immaturity, the childishness.  Is that it?  Is his size the problem?  Do people look at him and see a surly teenager, instead of an unhappy child?

On the one hand, she’s no longer angry with Cain, she’s just… angry with everyone he’s ever had contact with.  On the other hand… Yeah, that’s not much better.

She closes her eyes and focuses on her heart rate, willing it to slow.  She needs to be the adult here.  _Cain_ needs her to be the adult here.

“If you recall, I also said I’d be your friend,” she continues, before it hits her.  ‘ _My_ jailor’, he said.  Not ‘our’, ‘ _my_ ’.  “And the same goes for Charles, too.”

He twitches at that, and his head shifts slightly, an aborted movement towards her.  His gaze now rests on some midpoint between her and the curtains.

“What?” she asks.

Surprise registers on his face briefly – maybe he didn’t think she’d notice – before he wipes it off and puts his angry mask back on.  Although, she notes, it’s a little less convincing now.

“Why would you?” he finally asks.

“Why would I what?”

“Treat us – treat us the _same_?”

Darcy waits, sensing there’s more.  Then it bursts out of him, like water through a straining dam.

“Nobody _does_ that!  _Nobody_!  Everyone likes Charles best, Charles is a little _angel_ , everyone says so, Charles can’t do _anything_ wrong and I can’t do _anything_ right, Charles is the angel, I'm the, the _demon_ , and _it makes no sense_!”  Cain runs out of breath and he’s finally moving, turning to face her and pushing his hands through his hair.  Darcy’s glad he’s done with the statue impersonation, but he still won’t quite meet her eye.  “Charles is the freaky one, he’s the one who knows things he shouldn’t, who says creepy things to people, he’s the one who _blows things up_ and almost _burned the house down_!  But it’s always ‘Charles is such a good little boy, he’s a genius, he’s gonna be a famous scientist’, and now Father –” he cuts his tirade off as abruptly as he began it.

Darcy blinks a few times, not really sure where to start with that.  Eventually, “A demon?” she gets out, inquiringly.

“Well, it makes sense,” Cain mutters.

“I’m sorry?”

“We’re opposites, Fath- everyone says so.  Charles is clever, and I'm stupid…”

Darcy catches the aborted ‘Father’ but decides that’s an issue for another day.  God knows it’s going to be hard enough to untangle what he’s already given her.  “So,” she surmises, “you figured, if Charles is an angel, you must be a demon.”

He mumbles something that she thinks contains the word “yes”.

Darcy sighs and pulls herself fully onto the bed, crossing her legs and leaning slightly towards Cain.  “Cain, look at me.”

He manages to drag his eyes up to a point around her hairline, which she decides is good enough.

“Now, I'm sure in a lot of ways, you and Charles _are_ opposites.  I can’t be certain which ways, exactly, I've only known you for a few hours.  But what I do know is people.  And people are very complicated.  They can’t be reduced to a few characteristics and be packaged into a nice box with a neat little bow.”

Cain’s lips twitch and Darcy feels a spark of hope.

“Human beings are an endless mash-up of personality traits, thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs, potential and fuck knows what else, and if you ever tell your mother I said that word I will deny all knowledge of this conversation.”

Cain lets out a small snigger, then clamps his lips together hard, trying and failing to regain his stony expression.  Darcy grins openly.

“See?  I have a filthy mouth.  In a black-and-white world, that would probably make me a bad person.  But the world isn't that simple, and in this world, I like to think of it as just another facet of what makes me awesome.  And again, if you start cursing in front of your mother, I will tell her I am just as horrified as she is.  I’ll swoon and everything.”

Cain is finally looking at her, and he’s given up the fight to keep his face sullen.  A smile is tugging at his lips.  “So… so long as it’s not in front of Mother…”

“Knock yourself out.”  That earns her a brief but genuine grin and she has to sit on her hands to refrain from doing a fist pump.  Then she frowns.  “I think I had a point somewhere, but I’ve kinda lost track…”

“Opposites.  Me and Charles.”  Cain is smirking now, and it’s nothing like the cruel twist of his lips that he displayed when they first met, as he tore into her and waited for her tears.

“Right.  Thanks.  So what I'm saying is, there will be lots of things that make you very different from Charles, but there will also be lots of stuff that makes you the same, and then there’s all the shit – I mean stuff – in between.  As far as I can tell, Charles _is_ an angel.  He’s adorable.  But that definitely doesn’t make you a demon, and I'm sure you’re capable of being as sweet as a puppy when you set your mind to it.”

Cain looks a little nonplussed at that last image, and she decides to press ahead while she has the advantage.

“So, yeah, I'm gonna treat you and Charles the same.  If you’re good, you’ll both get to play, and we’ll go out and do fun stuff, and – hey, I’ll bake you cookies.  I have it on good authority that my cookies are the stuff of legends.”

Cain raises an eyebrow and she laughs.  “Be as sceptical as you like, mister, but one bite and _you will be a believer_ ,” she finishes in a dramatic whisper.  “But if you’re bad…” she gestures around her, “I’ll send you to your rooms.  So, do you know why I made you come here?”

The scowl is back in full force and Darcy tries not to recoil from the sudden change.  “Charles cheated.  He knew where the ball was gonna go.  That’s cheating.  It wasn’t fair.”

Darcy chews her lip.  “I don’t know whether Charles was cheating – it looked like luck to me.”  She holds up a hand as he starts to protest, and miraculously, he falls silent.  “Like I said, I can’t know for certain.  But even if he did cheat, that doesn’t make what you did ok.  Violence is never the answer, Cain,” she says, sounding so much like her grandmother and every elementary school teacher ever that she almost can’t suppress a wince.  “I know it’s frustrating, and when something makes you angry, it’s so tempting to lash out.  But you can’t.  You have to settle it with words.  I was refereeing, you should have come to me.  It was my job.  And besides, Charles is so much smaller than you, he doesn’t stand a chance if you hurt him.  Now, does _that_ seem fair to you?”

Cain is still scowling, but it’s more the chagrin of a child who knows he’s in the wrong, and less the defensive fury of a boy coiled to strike at the world before it can hurt him.  “No,” he says, very, very quietly.

“So, once more: do you know why I sent you to your room?”

His jaw tightens again and she can see the tendons in his neck and his forearms as he clenches his fists and his whole body tenses.  “Punishment,” he grinds out through gritted teeth.

“Exactly.  So, to recap: be good, we’ll have fun.  Be bad, you’ll be stuck in your room.  The same goes for Charles.”  Darcy swings her legs off the bed and bounces to her feet.  In a much lighter voice, she continues, “Well, that’s quite enough of that.  Charles and I are hungry – we’re going to get some lunch.  If you’re ready to behave and play nice with your brother, I’d very much like it if you joined us.  What do you say?”

He hasn’t moved from his position on the bed, although his head is turned to face her.  Incredulity is colouring his features, with a hint of mistrust.  She sighs inwardly.  Definitely not the reaction she was going for.  What can it possibly be this time?

“Cain?  Are you going to be good, or would you rather spend the day in here?”

“No – I’ll – I want lunch,” he says, stammering slightly as he levers himself to his feet.  He hasn’t confirmed that he’ll behave, but she can hear it in his tone.  Darcy waits for him to follow her, but he hovers, uncertain and still a little disbelieving, in the middle of the floor.

“What is it?”

“Aren’t you – you're not going to –” he cuts himself off and seems to change his mind.  “Right.  Ok.  Let’s go.”  He starts towards her, but it’s too late; she’s seen his eyes flick to the left, glancing into a corner of the room she hadn't inspected yet.  She follows his gaze towards a long, thin cylinder of wood resting innocuously against the wall.  It’s beige in colour, though if she squints she can see darker shades flecked on it, dark brown or burgundy, and it has the spaced-out ridges she associates with bamboo, and it’s curved over at one end.  It’s almost two feet in length and looks whip-thin and supple and as she looks she realises the flecks are dark red, dried stains, and she wishes she was still sitting down, the tide of incandescent rage that flushes through her body makes her so sick and dizzy.

For a few long moments she stares, struggling to get her breathing back under control, hoping the roaring flames in her head aren’t showing on her face.  She’s never felt fury like this before, white-hot, and feverish, a force making her strong, strong enough that she could beat Kurt Marko into a paste with her bare hands.

Her palm begins to itch, and she curls her gloved hand into a fist, hoping her tattoo isn't glowing.  She shuts her eyes, just in case they’re turning purple.  It would be very, very bad if she destroyed the room in a burst of lightning.  Worse, she has a feeling if she let her power out now, the carnage wouldn’t be limited to Cain’s bedroom.

Finally, she meets Cain’s eyes.  “No, Cain.  Never.”  She wants to make her voice gentle, but her anger hasn’t dissipated enough for that yet, and the best she can manage is a flat, emotionless tone.

She doesn’t think this anger will ever be doused completely.

Cain seems to understand, though: his eyes widen slightly before he drops his gaze to the floor, his cheeks reddening.  Darcy chooses to ignore this and forces some breeziness back into her tone.

“So, lunch.  I was thinking… fish paste sandwiches?”

Cain glares at her, but there’s a twinkle in his eye as he replies, “I fucking _hate_ fish paste.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy finishes her first day as Charles and Cain's nanny. It's exhausting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the end of Darcy's beginnings as Charles and Cain's nanny. This wasn't supposed to be this long, but apparently I've fallen in love with little Cain and Charles. Mostly Cain - I haven't really had a chance to get into Charles' character yet.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading about them! After this, more to come on Bucky and Steve, and what HYDRA's up to. Remember those HYDRA agents from chapter 5? I bet you don't. Yeah, they'll be back.

As they step out into the corridor, Darcy glances at Cain out the corner of her eye.  “Y’know, Cain, I bet anything you’re not stupid at all.  It’s just that it’s easy to feel dumb when you're stuck next to a genius all day, every day.”  She smiles ruefully.  “Trust me, I speak from experience.”

Cain returns her sideways glance as they amble slowly towards the staircase.  “Yeah?”

Darcy does a little happy dance inside her head.  Curiosity is a good sign.  So much better than anger or indifference.  Maybe she can build a rapport.  “Yeah.  I’ve spent a lot of time with a genius who made me feel dumber than a sack of hammers.  And I'm smart – I _know_ I'm smart.  I graduated high school early.”

A flicker of disbelief crosses Cain’s face and she scowls at him.  “I'm serious.  What, you think a woman can’t be clever?”

Cain appears to seriously consider this.  “Well…”

“Hey!”

Cain sniggers for the second time that hour.  It almost sounds good-natured.  “Everybody says…”

“Some free advice for you, Cain.  Take any statement that begins ‘everybody says’ with a pinch of salt, and you’ll soon find yourself the smartest person in the room.  Only idiots accept everything unquestioningly.  Start thinking more carefully about all the things everybody around you takes for granted, and it’s funny how quickly a room full of supposedly educated people looks like a flock of sheep.”

“Sheep?”

“Yeah, sheep.  You know, following the crowd, never questioning anything important, just going with the flow?”

He still looks a bit confused.  “So… I should do the opposite of what everybody else does?”

It occurs to Darcy suddenly that a) she’s trying to explain a concept that’s a little philosophical for an eleven year old – especially an abused, isolated 1940s kid, and b) it’s probably not a good idea to encourage said eleven year old to defy everything his elders tell him.  “That’s not what I'm saying.  I just want you to understand that people can say things with absolute certainty and still be wrong.  And just because there’s a thousand other people who think the same as them, doesn’t make them any less wrong.  So before you accept something as truth, think about it a little more deeply.”

Cain mulls this over, and she decides it’s time to move away from philosophy and back to teasing.  “Hah!  I've befuddled you, haven't I?  See?  Women are just as capable of being intelligent as men.  And apparently, _this_ woman is smarter than _this_ man.”  She reaches out and ruffles his hair.  He stiffens slightly, then, to her surprise, leans into it.  She can’t help but drop a companionable arm around his shoulders in response as they reach the first step and start to head downstairs with steady, plodding footsteps.

“That’s not fair!” he exclaims.

“Oh?  Why not?”

“Well…” he flounders for a moment.  Then his face lights up, not with a smile, exactly, but a sort of delighted triumph.  “I'm only eleven, and you’re… you're old!”

“I am not old!  I'm twenty!”

Cain looks up at her, wide-eyed and mocking.  “Cripes, you’re older than I thought.”

Darcy shoves him playfully, thinking, _Cripes.  From the boy who just told me, in profane terms, exactly what he thinks of fish paste.  Adorable_.  “You’ll be twenty too, before you know it.”  She tilts her head to the side in a show of thoughtfulness.  “But, you have a point, O youthful one.  I do have age on my side.  So, how about this.  You think about what I told you, and if you can prove you understood what I meant, I’ll accept that you’re just as smart as me.”

“Smarter!” Cain insists, and she can see the light of determination in his eyes.  _Note to self: subject responds well to challenge.  Will test this hypothesis._  She snorts.  _Jane would be so proud._

Cain makes an indignant sound, and she realises he probably thinks she was laughing at him.

“Nope.  Equal smarts or nothing.  Take it or leave it.”

“Fine,” Cain huffs, and Darcy has to bite her lip against a delighted squeal.  He’s just so damn _cute_ all of a sudden.  Dealing with Cain is going to be a challenge – she’s known that since she set eyes on him this morning – but now she thinks it could be a very rewarding challenge.

“So who’s yours?” Cain startles her out of her thoughts.

“Huh?”

“Your genius.”

“Hmm?  Oh, yes.  Her name is Jane.”  Darcy smiles fondly.  “Dr Jane Foster.  She’s an astrophysicist.  She’s super-scary-intelligent, and I feel like a nitwit next to her, but she doesn’t do it deliberately.  For all she’s a master at unlocking the mysteries of the heavens, she has zero common sense.  She gets so wrapped up in her latest discovery, nothing else around her matters.”  Darcy frowns.  “Even when it’s on fire.  Ok, that’s a bit of a character flaw.  But I love her, even though I have to feed her, and make sure she sleeps and showers.”

Cain’s brow furrows.  “She sounds like Charles.  He sets things on fire, too.  And sometimes stuff explodes.”  He looks up at her.  “Is she the same age as him?”

Fortunately, they’ve reached the bottom of the staircase, because Darcy misses the next step and her right foot lands rather heavily on the floor as she tries to contain her sudden, hysterical giggles.  Cain shoots her a rather alarmed look, though whether out of concern for her physical or mental health, she can’t be sure.

“No,” she gasps, “no, she’s an adult.  She’s older than me, in fact.”  She gives him a mischievous grin.  “So, mega-old, by your standards.”

“But you said you have to feed –” Cain looks slightly hurt, like he thinks she lied to him, and she needs to address that fast.

“I know what I said.  Listen carefully, Cain, this is your second piece of advice for the day: scientists, once they set their minds to something, are like babies.  They’re incapable of taking care of themselves and need a responsible adult to see to their basic needs to ensure their continued survival.”  She nods decisively.  “Remember that, as Charles grows up.”

“Why?”  Cain asks, mulishly.  “It’s not like _I’ll_ be taking care of him.”

“Why not?  You're his brother, aren’t you?”

“His mother married my father.  That doesn’t make him my brother.”

“No?  Honey, blood isn't the only thing that makes a family.  There are people out there who treat their own children like shit.”  She watches Cain’s face carefully, but it’s carefully blank.  “Those people don’t deserve children.  They don’t deserve to be called parents.”  They arrive at the last staircase between them and the kitchen, and she reaches for the bannister.  “But then there’s the other kind of family.”

“What kind?” Cain asks suspiciously, like he’s not sure if she’s making fun of him or not.

“The kind that finds you, and you didn’t even realise you needed them.  Take me, for example.  I was born an only child, but that astrophysicist I told you about?  She’s like a sister to me.”  Then a thought strikes her.  “And I have a brother, too.”

Cain looks up sharply.  “Really?  What’s his name?”

“Steve,” Darcy replies, and then tries not to go pink when her mind starts coming up with reasons why she didn’t say she had _two_ brothers.

They fall quiet as they descend, wrapped up in their own thoughts.  Then, just as the steps _finally_ end ( _seriously_ , Darcy thinks, _this house needs an elevator_ ), Cain speaks, so quietly she almost misses it.  Which might be the point.

“But I don’t _need_ a brother.”

Darcy raises her eyebrows at him, but his face is turned to the floor.  “Honey, we could _all_ use a little more family.”

Giving him no time to chew on that, she pushes the kitchen door open and steps inside.  Charles looks up from his seat at the kitchen counter, where Ellen is pressing an ice pack to his arm.  When he spots Cain, his face registers brief alarm, then goes through a complicated series of blink-and-you-miss-it micro-expressions, before he finally settles on a tentative smile.  Behind her, Darcy swears she feels Cain press slightly closer to her. 

“Charles, Cain has agreed to behave, and we’re all going to have lunch,” Darcy tells the younger boy.

Ellen _tsks_ disapprovingly.  “Now, Miss Lewis, I really don’t think –”  She breaks off abruptly, swallowing her words when Darcy turns a savage glare on her, forgetting her earlier resolve to stay on the good side of the household staff.  It’s not her best move, but the housekeeper’s readiness to condemn Cain enrages Darcy, even though she knows Cain has probably done plenty to deserve it in the past.  It’s irrational, but she can’t stand that Ellen won’t give the boy the benefit of the doubt.

Ellen splutters slightly, turns red, and scurries out of the kitchen.  Which is good, because what Darcy’s about to do is going to be hard enough without a peanut-gallery commentary.

“Cain, time to apologise to your brother.”

Cain’s eyes snap to hers, and when she sees the glimmer of betrayal there, she curses her mistake.  This wasn’t part of their discussion in his bedroom.  She can practically hear the cogs grinding in his head.  She can imagine what his mind is telling him: that she lured him out of the murky safety of his room with false promises of lunch, all to humiliate him and force him to apologise to Charles, she prefers Charles, _of course_ she prefers Charles…

Moving on instinct, she kneels in front of Cain, putting herself below his eye-line, forcing him to look down at her.  Towering over him (although, to be fair, she’s only a few short inches taller than him) seems like a bad idea at the moment; she needs to appear less threatening, prove that she’s not the same as… certain people.  So she crouches, makes herself smaller.  _Hey, if it works for animals, right?_

Charles makes a coughing sound to her right, but she ignores him for now.  “Cain, remember what we talked about?  You hurt your brother.  You shouldn’t have done that.”

“He cheated!”  The defiant air is back, with an edge.

“Even if that’s true, it’s beside the point.  You shouldn’t have responded with violence.  That’s what I'm asking you to apologise for.  You did something wrong, and now you have to say sorry.”  _Jesus, this is parenting 101.  The fuck are his parents doing?_

Cloth scrapes against wood as Charles shifts in his chair, apparently uncomfortable, and Darcy lowers her voice, speaking only to Cain.  “I should have warned you about this earlier, I'm sorry.  I forgot.  But you have to apologise.  Then we can put all this behind us.”  She gently captures one of his hands in hers.  “What do you say?”

It takes a physical effort not to hold her breath as she watches uncertainty waver in Cain’s face.  The truce she’s created with him is incredibly fragile, and she can’t afford any more missteps like this one.  Even this might be enough to evaporate the miniscule faith he’s shown in her.  Then, miracle of miracles, the warily trusting spark returns to his eyes, and he turns to Charles.  He’s visibly _not_ clenching his teeth as he says, “’M sorry.”

Charles positively _beams_ at Cain as he responds, “That’s quite alright.”

Darcy’s taken aback by just how adult he sounds.  Then she remembers her promise to Cain to treat the boys equally, and she realises they’re not quite done yet.  “Charles, Cain is under the impression that you cheated at stickball.  I didn’t see anything, so I’ll just ask you – did you cheat?”

Weirdly-Mature-Charles vanishes in an instant, replaced by a squirming eight year old who won’t look at her.  “Maybe,” he mumbles, sounding guilty.

Darcy has no idea what to make of that.  Cain is hard to deal with, sure, but she’s at least figured out pretty quickly what to expect from him and why.  His issues are actually pretty obvious, once you know to look.  Charles is a total wild card by comparison.  With difficulty, she contains a sigh.  It’s barely noon of her first day and she’s already exhausted.  She can untangle the mystery of his ‘maybe’ another time.

So for now, she just tells Charles, “I’ll make it simple.  Did you do something wrong?  If you did, apologise.”

Charles straightens in his chair, a look of understanding crossing his face, and nods firmly, apparently to himself.  Darcy marvels at how quickly he goes back to being Adult-Charles. “I’m very sorry,” he says to Cain in a formal voice, looking 100% sincere.

To Darcy’s amusement, Cain doesn’t know what to do with that.  His mouth actually gapes open, and he looks dazed, like Charles hit him round the head with the stickball bat, rather than offering an apology.

She claps her hands together and their attention reverts to her.  “Excellent.  Now that’s dealt with – lunch!  I don’t know about you two, but I’m starving.”

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

The rest of the day passes relatively uneventfully, after a lunch of sandwiches filled with whatever she could find in the fridge that the boys didn’t turn their noses up at.  In the end, that turns out to be eggs; both of them are surprisingly picky eaters, and she teases them about it, making Charles giggle and the tips of Cain’s ears turn red, even as he keeps his face still.  Darcy chats to them both as they eat, offering them carefully edited snippets of information about herself and teasing out of them details of their hobbies.  That turns out to be a dead end with Cain, and she drops the subject after her mind supplies her with a distressing image of him spending all his free time cross-legged on his bed, staring blankly at the curtains, trying not to think about the cruel strip of bamboo in the corner.  Charles, unsurprisingly, likes reading, and when he starts to talk about a ‘hypothesis’ that he’s dying ‘to test’, a faraway look on his face, she recognises the warning signs and distracts him with board games.

Three games of Scrabble and two _looong_ games of Monopoly later, it’s six pm, Darcy has defused more arguments than she can count, and Sharon is home and telling her she’s dismissed for the day.

As she pushes herself to her feet, wincing as her muscles object to spending hours sitting on the floor, Cain’s hand brushes against her arm, then retreats, like he’s thinking better of it.  Once she’s standing, Charles wraps his arms around her waist, burying his face in her stomach.  Darcy laughs and squeezes him tightly.

Sharon clears her throat impatiently from the doorway, and Darcy tamps down the brutal urge to slap her.

Taking her time, Darcy reaches out a hand to Cain, inviting him in for a hug.  He starts towards her, then stops and shuffles his feet instead.  It’s fucking adorable.  Giving him an understanding smile, she runs her fingers through his hair instead, then kisses the top of his head.  She extricates herself from Charles, with promises that she’ll see them both tomorrow afternoon.  The boys are home-schooled, and their tutors will be there in the morning, so Darcy isn't expected to arrive until later.  As she joins Sharon, she looks back to offer a parting grin, and struggles to keep smiling at what she sees.

Charles is bouncing gently on his toes, his hands shoved into his pockets.  He looks to be on the verge of running towards her, and he’s chewing on his lip.  Cain is doing his statue impersonation again, his face expressionless, his arms unnaturally straight and stiff at his sides, and it hits Darcy that _they don’t believe I'm coming back._   Determination grips her, coiling in her belly.  _Fuck that.  I’m coming back tomorrow and wild horses couldn’t stop me._

Charles’ posture relaxes and he looks up at his brother like he wants to tell him something, but Cain still doesn’t move.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Darcy says firmly, holding each of their gazes, then turns and follows Sharon out towards the front door.

“Charles certainly seems fond of you,” Sharon says, and her tone is decidedly frosty.

_If that makes you so jealous, try spending some time with him,_ Darcy thinks viciously.

“Yes,” she replies, not trusting herself to say anything else.

Sharon stops her on the threshold with a hand on her arm.

“How was your first day?  You seemed to have things well in hand with my sons, but Ellen told me there was a problem earlier…”

“A small incident, all sorted now.”

Sharon looks unconvinced.  “Are you sure?  I know that Cain can be a little… difficult.”

“Like I said, nothing major, and I dealt with it.”

“Cain is a big boy, and often boisterous.  If you have any trouble keeping him in line I would understand.”

“I really haven't had any trouble.”  Darcy can feel her polite smile becoming strained.

Sharon sighs.  “There’s no shame in admitting you need help, Darcy.  If he needs stricter discipline than you feel you can impose, I can always ask my husband –”

“No!”  Darcy almost shouts the word.  She pushes down the cold horror seeping through her body.  Her mind feeds her thoughts of a large, shadowy figure advancing on Cain through that dark, bare bedroom.  The casual way Sharon throws the suggestion out there, like this is _normal,_ has her clenching and unclenching her fists.  She tries for a more measured tone.  “No, I mean it, I had everything under control, and we all had a lovely day together.”

“There’s no need to protect my sensitivities, Darcy, I know Cain is a little monster.  Always has been.  And I know he hurt my son.”

There’s a sort of offhand cruelty in Sharon’s voice now, and Darcy blames that for the next words that come out of her mouth.

“I thought they were both your sons.”

Sharon’s eyes widen as she realises her blunder.  “I – I – yes, of course.  Son – stepson – both – they’re both my sons.  I mean, er, that is, I know Cain injured Charles,” she finishes, recouping.

“Ellen exaggerated.  Charles is fine, and Cain apologised, and then we played board games.”

Sharon blinks.  “He… apologised?”

“Yes.”  Darcy tries to keep her tone neutral rather than triumphant.

Sharon snorts softly.  “Well.  I wouldn’t count on such politeness lasting.  Heaven knows my husband has tried time and time again to teach that boy manners, but he just won’t learn.”  She shakes her head sadly.  “Remember, when you can’t handle him anymore, let me know.  Kurt will sort him out.”  Apparently recovering from Darcy’s curveball, she gives her a look of solidarity that makes Darcy sick to her stomach.  Darcy stares back, unblinking, for several long moments.  Her gut blazes with the desire to run back inside, to stay with Charles and Cain and protect them from their own parents.  She burns to take them away from this huge mansion with its cold walls and unfeeling rooms, to take them to Brooklyn with her.  To show them what home is supposed to be, what family really means.

“I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon,” she finally spits out, and starts walking down to the waiting car before she can do something stupid, like punch Sharon in the face.

Despite the anger roiling inside her, she’s exhausted, and she spends most of the drive home fast asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We'll be returning to Charles and Cain in later chapters, but the next chap is going to be with Bucky and/or Steve. It might be from Bucky's POV. I'm not sure yet.
> 
> Thanks for bearing with me, and being so nice about this rather out-of-left field introduction of two major characters. I know you've all been dying to see more of Bucky - fear not, he'll be in the next chapter!


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The return of Bucky and Steve!  
> Coffee is drunk, talks are had, tears are shed, comforting happens, fears are soothed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a long one! You've all been so patient with me as I set up Charles and Cain, so here's what you've all been waiting for - Bucky and Steve.

Bucky’s standing in the kitchen when he hears the scrape of a key in the lock, and looks up in time to see Darcy close the door behind her.

“Hi,” he greets her with a smile, “I’m just makin’ some coffee.  Want some?”

“Oh, God,” she replies, “you just earned my undying devotion.”

He tries to ignore the leap in his stomach at her words, focussing instead on her flippant tone.  They flirt all the time.  This is nothing new.

She eases herself down at the kitchen counter slowly, like her whole body is aching.  Which might be the case; she certainly looks tired.  With a heavy sigh, she pulls off the thin gloves she insists on wearing in public, despite the hot weather.  He doesn’t really understand why she wears them – when he asked, she muttered something about covering up her tattoo.  That didn’t make sense to him.  When Darcy makes a decision she stands by it – see the couch argument and her new job – so it’s incongruous that she would get a tattoo if she was just going to regret it.  So far, he’s been unable to come up with an answer, and it’s gone on his mental list of things he shouldn’t ask her.

As he hands her a steaming mug, a smile spreads across her face and he inhales sharply.  Those red lips _do_ things to him – and somehow, the feeling always takes him by surprise.

But now, as he looks closer, he realises there’s a strain to her smile, a forced quality, and the stomach-flipping feeling hardens to a knot of worry.  He waits while she takes a few sips, wincing as the scalding liquid floods her mouth.  A small smirk creeps onto his face.  No matter how hot it is, Darcy never waits to drink her coffee – she insists she needs the caffeine _now_ , and a burnt tongue is a small price to pay for bitter goodness.

Usually, a hot drink is all she needs if she’s looking a little worn down.  But the weary edge is still there, and Bucky’s concern grows.

“Doll?” he asks tentatively.  “Are you alright?”

She looks up sharply, plastered-on smile slipping for a moment before she pushes it back into place.  “I’m fine.  Why would you think otherwise?”

“I dunno, Darce.  You just… you look…”  He flounders, reaching in frustration for words that dance out of reach.  Steve always jokes that Bucky’s a lothario, a ladies’ man, that he could talk a woman into giving him her life savings and moving to Barbados with him.  Not that he ever _would_ – for all Steve’s teasing, they both know that’s all it is – teasing.

But now, faced with Darcy apparently on the verge of tears, Bucky’s famous silver tongue fails him.  As he gazes at the woman in front of him, with her tumbling brown curls and sea-blue eyes, her mocking, scarlet grin and quick words, he doesn’t know what to say.  He thinks of her dinners, simple potatoes and rice transformed into ambrosia at her attentions, of the couch that he can’t look at without imagining her there, curled up and rumpled in sleep, of the glint in her eye when they first met her, choked and feral in a back alley.  She didn’t cry then, and he’s been in awe of her inner strength since.

It shouldn’t be this hard.  He’s dealt with crying women before, and has found them easy to comfort – a few well-placed platitudes, a squeeze of their hand, maybe a compliment if it seems appropriate to the atmosphere. 

So what’s different now?  The answer is simple, really.  He just needs to admit it to himself.

Darcy _matters._   She matters in a way no one else ever has.  He didn’t know those other women – their unhappiness wasn't important, not to him.  But he knows Darcy.  She’s bound herself to him, to his home and his couch, his heart and his soul.  And Darcy’s tears are like a knife in his gut, and as he watches, they well up in her eyes and pour over her cheeks.

Before he even realises he’s moved, his arms have wrapped tight around her shoulders, his chin has tucked over her head.  Her whole body shudders with sobs, silent at first, then high-pitched and keening.  The knife twists and he tugs her closer.

Bucky doesn’t know how long they stand like that, her breath hitching against his chest, his fingers dragging through her hair.  Long enough for her sobs to subside to quiet whimpers, and her warm tears to go cold and then dry on his shirt.  Finally, she speaks.

“I miss my grandma.”

It’s barely more than a whisper, but in Bucky’s hyper-focus on Darcy, the sound reaches his ears clearly.

He can’t help it.  He tenses.

She feels it, of course – how could she not, with him folded so completely around her – and gives a wet chuckle.  It’s an odd sound, half-humorous, half-sad.  With her so close, maybe closer than she’s ever been, the noise runs through him almost as if it had come from him.

“Don’t worry,” she says, and Bucky wants to protest, _I’m not worried_ , but that would be a lie.  He’s terrified, terrified that she’s going to leave and go back to her family, whoever they are, wherever they are, even though he knows she can’t, that for whatever reason, she’s stuck here in Brooklyn with him and Steve.  It’s another of those things they just don’t talk about.

“I still don’t know how to get home,” she continues.  “I might never be able to go home.”

Bucky hates himself for relaxing, for being glad that she’s trapped.  But he’ll happily take that guilt if it means she stays with them for even just a little longer.

He adamantly doesn’t think about how long he _really_ wants her to stay.

“So… your grandma?” he asks, forcing himself to return to the problem at hand.  He’s never heard her talk about her family before, and he wonders just what happened today that made her mention her grandmother now.

“Yeah.  Suddenly I really wanna see her, talk to her.  It was fine before – I had Steve, and you, and it was like I didn’t really need anything else”–

His heart clenches and swells, all at once.

–“but after seeing those boys today… I guess I got homesick.”  Darcy pulls back and rubs at her eyes.  “I’m sorry I got your shirt all wet.”

He laughs.  “Doll, I couldn’t care less about the damn shirt.  I just hate seein’ you cry.”

She blushes, then looks up at him and for the first time since she walked in the door, her smile is genuine and he knows he’s said the right thing.  She sits back down at the kitchen counter and wraps her fingers around her coffee.  Raising it to her lips, she takes a gulp, and replaces it with a grimace.

“Ugh.  It’s gone cold.”

Her face is so put-out he has to push down a laugh.  Then she turns her face up at him pleadingly and he backs away with his hands held up in surrender.

“Woah, easy on the pout there, doll.  You know I can’t resist those lips.”

He’s rewarded with another delightful reddening of her cheeks.  It used to be so difficult to get her to blush; his bawdy comments, his sincere compliments, his casual flirting, all used to roll off her like water, and she never had any trouble repaying him in kind.  But lately even the tamest of flirtations have her face matching her lipstick, and he has to admit, it makes him giddy to think how much he’s capable of affecting her.

Of course, it’s not like she’s the only one struggling to remain casual these days.  The slightest indication of interest from her is enough to make his heart stutter like a teenager.  Steve laughs at him, to see him turned upside down and inside out, his moods at the mercy of one woman.  And yet, he can’t bring himself to resent it.

He pours the beans into the coffee maker, one of their few indulgences.  When Darcy first saw it, she had no idea what it was or how to work it – which both he and Steve found odd, since she consumes caffeine like water and calls it ‘nectar of the gods’.  Now, of course, she’s an expert, not to mention the only one who can get it to produce a decent cup of joe when it’s on the fritz.  But, minx that she is, she’ll only do it if they address her as ‘O Coffee-Maker-Whisperer-Supreme’, despite Bucky’s protests that the title is far too much of a mouthful at six in the morning.

When he places the fresh mug in front of her, she graces him with another of those smiles that make his breath quicken.  Cheeks splotchy, eyes swollen, hair in disarray from where he’s been running his fingers through it, her smile is still the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

 _Just admit it, you fool,_ he thinks wryly, _Steve is right.  You are so gone on this girl, your heart’s in a different state._

He clears his throat.  “Tell me what’s got you so bent outta shape.”

Her eyes drop down to the table for a moment, then she begins to speak.

She tells him about two boys, the younger loved but neglected by his mother, the elder beaten by his father with a savage length of wood that she longed to snap into pieces and burn, but forced herself to walk away from.  Bucky feels the bile of anger rising in him just listening to her.

“I couldn’t destroy it, no matter how much I wanted to.  The father would notice it was missing and blame Cain, probably.  I can only imagine what he’d do then.”  She shudders.  “I don’t _want_ to imagine.”

Bucky reaches out and places a hand over hers.  They’re sitting close, knees touching, foreheads brushing.

“I don’t know if I coulda done that,” he murmurs.  “The right thing.  I probably woulda let my anger get the best’a me.  You thought of the little boy first.”

Darcy gives him a weak smile and sighs.

“He just looked so lost, Bucky.  How could anyone _do_ that to a child?  And I bet you anything the whole household knows, but even if there was anything they could do, they wouldn’t bother.  Everyone’s written him off as a lost cause.  Even his stepmother, who always calls him her ‘son’, like she loves him as much as Charles.  But it’s all for show.  Sharon’s so busy _playing_ the part of perfect, loving mother, she’s forgotten to actually _be_ one.”  Darcy snorts disdainfully.  “And she was obviously jealous that Charles liked me.  I don’t get that woman.  She wants to be the centre of her son’s world, but she won’t spend any time with him?  Selfish bitch.”  She rubs a hand over her eyes.  “Anyway, that’s why I was crying.  I always loved my grandma, I always knew I was lucky, but… there’s a difference between just knowing and really _knowing_ … y’know?”

Bucky chuckles.  “Yeah.”

There’s a long silence before she speaks again, and when she does, only her lips move.

“I don’t remember my parents all that much.”  Her voice is soft and Bucky leans closer.  “They died when I was very young.  My grandparents took me in with no fuss, like it was completely natural.  And I know I wasn’t easy.  I cried and screamed and threw tantrums ‘cause I wanted my mom and dad.  Must’ve broken their hearts.”

It’s the most she’s ever told him about her home and family.  She’s given him tiny shards of herself, over the past few weeks, delicate jigsaw pieces that slot together slowly to form a frustratingly incomplete picture.  He knows the important stuff, like her love for coffee and music, her independence and her stubbornness, her kindness and her sarcasm; he knows her as a person.  But so much of her remains a mystery, and he wants all of her, all her puzzle pieces, jagged and smooth and everything in between, until he can look at her and know every inch of her intimately.

There are plenty of men who like a woman with mystery and he used to think he was one of them.  Now he realises he was a fool.  Those women are for a brief fling, a couple of quick screws before they flow on like water, like wind – nothing substantial.

Darcy is so much more.

So he tries to match her stillness, afraid if he moves he’ll startle her like a wild animal and she’ll stop talking.  He doesn’t move as she hands him this rare piece of herself.  He feels the weight of it settle on his heart where it belongs, this oh-so-precious burden she’s sharing with him, and he welcomes it.

“Grandpa died just a couple of years after I arrived – I don’t remember him all that well, either.  But Grandma, she was always there.  Through every scrape and bruise and bully, she was there.  Even when I pushed her away, ‘cause children are foolish like that, she always found a way to let me know I could count on her.”  Darcy takes a shuddering breath and her eyes flutter closed.  “I never thanked her.  I might never see her again – if I'm being honest, it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever see her again, and I really regret never telling her that I _know_ now.  I finally understand all that she’s done for me, and I'm so grateful.”  She finally looks up at Bucky, and her face is inches away from his.  “Those boys never had a Donna Lewis.  I want to be their Donna Lewis.”  She snorts and turns away, staring at the sink.  “But I don’t think I have the strength.  Or the patience.”

That makes Bucky frown, and he places a finger on the side of her chin and nudges her face back around to his.  He blames his next action on impulse, on the hazy quiet of the apartment, on her closeness, on the intimacy of the conversation, on her chewed lips, on the fact that he’s been falling in love with her from the moment he laid eyes on her and he doesn’t know how to stop.

He kisses her.

It’s sweet and slow and almost chaste.  Her lips are even softer than he imagined and she tastes of coffee and flowers, of summer and _Darcy_.  She leans into him readily, erasing any fears he had of rejection.  He spears his fingers through her hair and she opens to him and he deepens the kiss.  When he licks into her mouth she makes a moan that goes straight to his groin and almost undoes him.  She pushes against his lips hungrily and then she’s in his lap and his arms are winding around her waist, tugging her closer, holding her just as he’s always longed to.

But he remembers, vaguely, that before this, before his lips met hers and changed _everything_ , he had something to say to her, something _important._   So though it physically hurts to do it, he wrenches his lips away from hers.  His forehead leans against hers and they sit there panting, neither pulling any further away.  It takes a long time and a gargantuan effort not to just slant his mouth to hers again – _so close and ready and willing and open_ – but eventually he forces his breathing to slow and his thoughts to arrange into some sort of coherent order.  And he tells her.

“You, Darcy Lewis, are the strongest person I know.”

Darcy opens her eyes and looks at him without speaking for such a long time he starts to panic.  Then he sees the expression on her face: the glistening in her eyes, the trembling of her lips, and he understands.  Then she leans back down towards him and both of them forget about words.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

It’s late at night, maybe eleven, when the scents of cooking finally waft through to Steve’s room and he sighs in relief.  It’s safe to come out.

After selling all his papers in the morning, he went to his mother’s for a visit.  He found her a little under the weather, which in itself isn't unusual: as a nurse in the infectious diseases ward, she’s exposed to all sorts of illnesses day in day out.  But unlike her son, Sarah Rogers has always been a robust woman, a fact belied by her slight frame.  He fussed over her for hours, and no matter how much she called him a worrywart and insisted she was fine, he can’t shake the feeling that something’s different this time.

So he stayed late, and arrived home late.  He wasn’t surprised to see Darcy and Bucky at the kitchen table, turned towards each other, heads bowed inwards almost conspiratorially, talking in low voices, and was equally unsurprised when they didn’t notice his entrance.

He didn’t take it personally; in fact, the main thought in his head was _finally._   He crossed quietly to his bedroom and hid, hoping the uninterrupted privacy would push their private moment into something more intimate.  Pulling out a book, he passed his time reading and keeping an ear out until he realised that the pair had gone _very_ quiet, and he smiled.

Until he realised he hadn't eaten dinner yet and he was very hungry.

Now that the coast is clear, he folds up his book and emerges from his room, stopping in his doorway to look at the happy couple.  Bucky’s eyes follow Darcy as she moves fluidly around the kitchen like she’s lived in their apartment her whole life, rather than just a few weeks.  It’s not that strange, when he thinks about it.  Maybe he and Bucky have been waiting for this girl for years.  She’s firmly rooted in their lives now, and Steve can no longer remember what it was like to come home to an apartment with just Bucky, to eat food that wasn’t prepared by her, to not feel her hugs and hear her laughter and blush at her language.

She calls him the brother she never knew she needed.  He’s not sure if he’s worthy of that honour, but she’s certainly the sister he never realised he was missing.

It’s more than that for Bucky, so much more.  Darcy is everything he needs, and even if Bucky couldn’t see that at first, Steve could.  Bucky has spent so much of his life taking care of everybody around him – his mother, his little sister, Steve – _especially_ Steve – that he forgets about himself.  It’s been a question that kept him up many nights in the past.  Bucky takes care of everyone, but who looks out for Bucky?  So when Darcy arrived, Bucky couldn’t see her for what she was at first, but Steve could.

Because Steve is the outlier, always on the edges, never quite participating, never quite feeling _right_ , like something was missing.  Bucky says that Steve was born in the wrong body, that his insides don’t match his outsides.  He means it as a joke, but Steve thinks he has a point.

So if Steve is always on the outside, looking in, it means he’s really _looking_.  He sees.  So even before the stolen glances passing between his two best friends became so evident a blind man could see them, Steve noticed, and Steve understood.

And really, if the looks weren't obvious before, they lack even the subtlety of a freight train now.

He feels a twinge of… something as he watches the couple.  Once he puts a name to it, it temporarily overwhelms him, crushing him in its absolute blackness, a seeping tar that speaks to him.

 _Alone_ , it whispers.

Because, if he’s really being honest, although he longed for this, wanted this happiness for his friends, he also feared it.  It’s the reason he told Darcy all those stories of Bucky’s womanising.  Bucky thinks Steve did it to tease him, to laugh at him while he squirmed, uncomfortable.  And he knows Darcy thinks it was to make her laugh, to use that little ember of mischief she says he has.  _Just an ember_ , she tells him, _not even a spark_.  _You’re just too_ good _for that_.  She says the word with that unshakeable faith shining in her eyes, and he feels sick that she doesn’t know, doesn’t see the truth.  It wasn’t mischief pushing him to tell those stories, it was fear.  Yes, he wanted to see her smile, hear her giggle, but he also saw the uncertain looks she threw Bucky’s way when he told her about another of Bucky’s conquests.  So he told her about more women, more drunken nights, in a guilty effort to put off the inevitable just a little while longer.

Because now it’s not _Bucky and Darcy and Steve_ anymore, it’s _Bucky and Darcy,_ and _Steve_ , and he’s so afraid of losing the one place where he doesn’t feel like an outsider that he’s suffocating.

Taking a deep breath to stave off the burning tears threatening to spring to his eyes, he chokes back the inky-black feeling and starts towards the kitchen.

“Is that mashed potatoes?”

Darcy and Bucky both start, and turn to face him, identical grins splitting their faces wide open.

“Steve!  Hey, glad you’re here, there’s something we have to tell –”

“Stevie, listen, me ‘n’ Darce gotta tell –”

And just like that, the blackness falls away.

Steve holds up his hand to silence them.  “Don’t bother.  I know.”

“You do?”  They speak in unison, and their eyes widen.  And now Steve feels his own face cracking into a smile, a giddy happiness overtaking him.

“Yep.  An’ let me be the first to say: took you long enough!”

They both laugh at that, then Bucky narrows his eyes at Steve.

“Hang on, punk… _how_ do you know, exactly?”

“Weeeellll…”  Steve draws out the word.  He can _feel_ his eyes glittering.  “’s not my fault you guys were so busy, you didn’t hear me come in…”

Bucky laughs and Darcy flushes bright red, and Steve wonders exactly what they’ve been up to all evening.  He deliberately neglects to tell them that when he walked in they were only talking, and that he went straight to his room.

_There’s that ember again._

And this time, there’s no taint of darkness.

Darcy starts plating up their dinner, and Steve takes a seat at the kitchen table.

“So, Darcy, how was your first day?”

Her expression clouds before she launches into a description of everything she’d like to string Sharon and Kurt Marko up for.  Her words are violent, but underneath it all he can hear the strong thread of affection, the thing binding her anger together.  Whether she knows it or not yet, she loves those kids already.

He meets Bucky’s eyes, and knows they’re both thinking the same thing.

_Charles and Cain have got themselves one hell of a protector._

“Darcy wants to help the kids,” Bucky tells him, “but she doesn’t think she’s got the strength or the patience.”

Steve raises his eyebrows.  “You’ve got strength a’plenty, Darce –”

“’S what I said,” Bucky mutters.

“– an’ as for patience,” Steve continues, more loudly, “you got plenty’a that, too.  When it matters.”  He pauses, takes a sip of his water and puts his glass down again.  “So long as you’ve had at least five cups’a joe.”

“Hey!”  Darcy’s predictably indignant, but he can see she’s reassured.

After that, the dinner conversation dissolves into gentle mockery and joking.  Steve digs in to his potatoes and lets his friends’ voices wash over him, remembering them both falling over themselves in their eagerness to tell him about their shiny new relationship.

Because of course they wanted to tell him.  They wanted to share their happiness with him.  They want to remain _Bucky and Darcy and Steve_ just as much as he does.  There will always be room for him in their lives, and room for them in his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually didn't mean for Darcy and Bucky to get together until a few chaps later, but I was writing this one, and it just seemed right. Or maybe I'm just impatient. Eh. Either way, hope you enjoyed it! More Bucky next chapter, and probably Charles and Cain too.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy and Bucky continue to solidify their new relationship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You all loved the fluff so much last time - and let's face it, so did I - that I couldn't resist writing more.

That night, for the first time, Darcy doesn’t sleep on the couch.

Bucky scoots up next to her during dinner and tangles his legs with hers under the table, and it’s perfect, the three of them huddled close together in the dim light of the kitchen, trading barbs and sharing stories.  Once Darcy recovers from her initial embarrassment at maybe being caught by Steve during what she calls her “epic make-out session” with Bucky (it took him and Steve a while to figure out what she meant by that), she starts needling Steve about what he may or may not have seen.  Soon, her blush has been replaced by a wicked grin and it’s Steve’s turn to flush crimson.

Bucky watches Steve carefully during dinner, and notices Darcy doing the same.  There was something off about his friend’s smile when he stepped out of his room earlier, but it was so fleeting Bucky’s tempted to chalk it up to his imagination.  Now, though, his expression is so blissed-out it’s bordering on manic, and it’s making Bucky suspicious.  Steve seems unreasonably happy about Darcy and Bucky being a couple, and he can’t figure out why.

A couple.  Him and Darcy.

He ducks his head to hide the smile on his face at the thought, which he’s sure must be completely goofy.

Too late – Steve’s spotted him, and judging by the gleam in his eye, Bucky’s in for some serious ribbing later.

Once the table’s cleared, Steve executes a wide, extremely fake yawn, complete with arm stretches, announces that he’s wiped and scuttles off to his room.  He pauses in the doorway, looks back at them and sniggers.  He dodges into his room and barricades himself inside just in time for the wet sponge to bounce harmlessly off the door and fall to the floor.

Darcy glares at Bucky until he walks over and retrieves the sponge with a sheepish expression.  Depositing it on the surface next to the sink where Darcy has already started the washing up, Bucky catches her by the waist and pulls her in for a kiss.  She squeals in mock protest, then retaliates by flicking suds at him.  Undeterred, he just kisses her harder, and she sinks into it, her hands coming up to rest on the back of his neck, sending trickles of soapy water down the back of his shirt.

He doesn’t care.

Eventually, they tear themselves apart long enough to finish clearing up.  Darcy scrubs and Bucky dries, then they move to snuggle together on the couch, neither of them wanting to let the moment go just yet, despite it being midnight and Bucky needing to be up at six.

Emboldened by their new closeness, Bucky lets himself ask her to tell him more about her family.  As she talks about her grandmother, he starts to understand the person Darcy is today a little better.  It makes sense now, how caring Darcy is.  The realisation breaks his heart, but it’s clear to Bucky that losing her parents young and being raised by her grandmother is a big part of what makes Darcy… _Darcy._   She understands the value of unconditional love more than most – because when her mom and dad were gone, her grandmother took it upon herself to make sure Darcy knew what it was to have a family.  That rarity, of tragedy giving birth to great beauty, is so quintessentially Darcy.  After all, this is the girl who, lost and alone, charmed her way into their hearts and brought them a joy neither of them could ever have imagined.

“Can you tell me about your parents?” he asks tentatively, his thumb stroking over her hip.  His arms are around her waist, her back leaning against his chest.  If he turns his head just a little, he can press a kiss to her cheek.  So he does.

Darcy twists her neck and captures his lips with hers before he can move them away, and for a little while he’s lost in the slow sensation of her mouth moving against his.  He thinks this might be her way of avoiding the question – not that he minds – but then she breaks away.

“They were high school sweethearts,” she says, and there’s a hard edge to her voice.  “They were just fifteen when my mom got pregnant.  Her parents were furious and kicked her out.”  She pauses, and Bucky hooks his fingers into her hair, marvelling at its softness.  “She was lucky.  My dad’s parents weren’t nearly so judgemental, so she moved in with them.  Mom and Dad married when they turned eighteen, and moved to New York.  Needed to get away from the gossip and the stares, you know?  But there was a car crash when I was five, and I ended up back in Georgia with my grandma.”

“You’re from Georgia?”  Bucky’s surprised, and then it clicks.  “Ah.  Your accent.  I always knew it wasn’t New York, but I couldn’t place it.”

Darcy laughs.  “I find people tend to hear a southern accent, and assume I'm stupid.  So I sort of… softened it until people couldn’t tell anymore.”

Bucky gives her a squeeze.  “People are idiots.”

Darcy nods.  “This is true.  Still… they’re better here than they are back home.  The folks in my town have long memories.  Small town, y’know?  And Mom and Dad… it was a bit of a scandal.  Although,” she adds hastily, “not nearly as much as _you_ would think.”

Bucky doesn’t know what to make of that last statement, especially her emphasis on _you_.  Apparently, he won’t be unravelling the full mystery of Darcy Lewis tonight.  It’s frustrating, but he’s happy with what he’s been given already.

Darcy doesn’t quite manage to stifle a yawn, and Bucky chuckles.  “Come on, doll, time for bed.”  He disentangles himself from her and stands.  Turning back to her, he holds his hand out to pull her up.  She looks at it and he can see her about to protest her tiredness until she sees his face and understands.  With a sleepy smile, she lets him pull her to her feet and lead her to his bedroom.

His bed isn’t very big, somewhere between a single and a double, but all it means is that he has to hold her close, and Bucky really isn't complaining.  They settle down, with him on his back and her curled into his side, and she’s asleep before he’s even tugged the covers up around them.  He drops one last kiss onto her curls before following her into pleasant dreams of soft, milky skin and laughing blue eyes.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

Bucky’s alarm goes off at six the next morning and he’s about to groan with exhaustion before he remembers that nothing can ruin his mood today.  Right now, he feels like he’ll be riding this high for the rest of his life.

Sure enough, there are those big eyes blinking sleepily up at him, lips curving into a dazed smile so adorable he distracts himself with them for a couple of minutes.  When they break apart again, they’re both wide awake.  _Very_ awake, in his case.

Darcy’s hand brushes against him very deliberately under the covers and he jerks.  She smirks at him.  “Come on, Buckaroo, up an’ at ‘em.”

He rolls his eyes at the nickname.  She’s always coming up with silly monikers for him and Steve, but she takes special delight in mocking his middle name.  “I _am_ up,” he tells her, in a voice that sounds pathetic even to his own ears.  “Very up.  That’s the problem.”

She snorts at him.  “Time to get out of bed, you _know_ that’s what I meant.  There’s coffee to be drunk, breakfast to be eaten, work to be…worked.  And I need a shower.”  She rolls out of bed, heading for the door, and he bites back a pitiful whine.  In the threshold she stops, her back to him, and turns her head, not quite looking back at him.  “Well?  Are you going to join me or not?”

He’s never moved so fast in his life.

The shower is a little slice of heaven carved out of a mundane morning routine.  _Except it’s_ not _mundane now_ , Bucky thinks.  _It could never be tedious, not with Darcy right here, an’ everythin’ different between us now._

Hands and lips moving under the spray, it’s a steady exploration of bodies, of ways to make the other moan and sigh.  He sucks kisses along her neck, grazes his teeth over her nipple; she scrapes her nails down his back and nips at his bottom lip.  As Darcy runs her hand up and down his length, as he twists and curls his fingers and listens to the hitch in her breathing, he’s torn between feeling full and warm and sated, and frustrated that there isn’t time for _more_.  He wants to feel every inch of her, to be inside her, to slot their bodies together the way their hearts have already done.

But Darcy’s right, he’s going to be late for work as it is, and any hot water they might have saved in showering together, they’ve used up in… showering _together._   Somehow he thinks Steve’s happiness for them isn’t going to last if they condemn him to icy showers.

There’s not much talking at breakfast, just the sounds of food being gulped down and the percolator boiling on the stove.  Steve emerges from the bathroom to join them in a slice of toast.  He pulls a strange face somewhere between a disapproving frown and a knowing smile, which Darcy giggles at and Bucky takes to mean that they failed to leave enough hot water for Steve after all.

At some point, Darcy has apparently decided that her new relationship with Bucky means that Steve deserves even more hugs than before.  Muttering something about ‘equal treatment’ and ‘fair distribution of affection’, she rounds the kitchen table to wrap her arms around Steve from behind and drop her head onto his shoulder and just… stay there.  Steve keeps right on munching his toast, though he does reach up to pat Darcy absently on the head.

Bucky’s not fooled: he can see Steve’s face.  Twin spots of pink have appeared high on his cheeks, and a smile is tugging at his lips.

Eventually, Bucky and Steve have to leave for work, though it yanks at Bucky’s gut and he’s tempted to blow off the docks altogether, salary be damned.  Darcy bids them goodbye at the door with her usual kiss on the cheek for Steve (although she does throw in a slightly tighter hug than usual) but she pulls Bucky down by the collar to plant a _filthy_ kiss on his mouth.  It goes on for far longer than they have time for, with Steve clearing his throat several times and finally dragging Bucky away by the arm when they ignore him.

“So,” Steve says as they step out of the apartment building into the warm air.

Bucky inhales deeply, breathing in the scents around him.  “You smell that, Stevie?  That’s summer, right there.  That scent of honeysuckle and grass and sunlight –”

“And motor oil, and loose garbage,” Steve interrupts.  “We’re in the middle of the city, Buck, not the damn countryside.”  He’s going for grumpy and sarcastic, but ruins it by bursting out laughing.  He claps Bucky hard on the back.  “Jesus, it certainly took you two long enough.  I thought I was gonna have to bang your heads together or somethin’.”

Bucky beams down at his friend.  “Nothin’ can ruin my day today, Stevie, nothin’.  I'm serious, everythin’ feels different.  Brighter.  Fresher.”

Steve shakes his head.  “Y’know, sometimes I forget you’re actually an artist, Buck, what with all your dirty language an’ innuendo.  But you really are a softie at heart.”  He turns suddenly serious.  “She sees that.”

Bucky waits, sensing Steve’s not done.  Sure enough, he continues a few moments later.

“When we found Darcy, she… well, you remember.  She wasn’t in a good state, even if she did put a brave face on it.  But even then, there was somethin’ about her.  I saw the way you looked at her.  An’ it didn’t take long for us to get hopelessly attached, did it?”

Bucky chuckles his agreement.

“Now look at her.  Walkin’ round our apartment like she’s never belonged anywhere else.  A job she’s already thrown herself headfirst into.  Those kids are damn lucky.”

Bucky nods.  “Hell, yeah.  They needed a Darcy, an’ that’s exactly what they’ve got.”

“So I figured,” Steve carries on, as though Bucky hadn't interrupted, “she’s got a home, a job, a family, now all she needs is a fella.  Or, more precisely, what she needs is for Bucky to get his head outta his ass and realise she’s just as in love with him as he is with her.”

Bucky stops walking.  Steve carries on a few paces before noticing he’s alone, and turns back to cast a despairing look at his friend.  “Oh, come _on_.  You seriously still don’ see it?  Even after last night?”  He marches up to Bucky and pokes a finger into his chest.  “Open your eyes, Buck.  You’re head over heels for that girl, and she feels exactly the same way.”

Bucky looks at him dubiously.

Steve sighs.  “Am I ever wrong about this stuff?”

Bucky shakes his head.  “Never.”

“Well, there you go.”

They continue on down the street, and Bucky doesn’t bother hiding the dopey grin plastered all over his face.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

“An’ remember, this is my little sister we’re talkin’ about.  You hurt her, an’ –”

“Yeah, yeah, I get the message.”

“Punk.”

“Jerk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you liked it! Back to Cain and Charles next chapter.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy tries to make it through her second day of work, and has a little daydream about Bucky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fairly long one this time. With a bit of sort-of smut. I've never tried to write smut before, so this was a weird experience, though quite enjoyable!
> 
> I'm loving reading your comments, you've all been so kind and encouraging! I'm loving writing this story, and you guys have actually provided quite a bit of inspiration. I now have the next couple of arcs carefully plotted out, which should hopefully stave off writer's block and allow me to churn the updates out quite quickly.
> 
> It seems like you guys aren't too fussed about length of updates, so if I come to a good stopping point, I'll probably just post the chapters and put anything I didn't get in into the next chapter, even if it means my updates are shorter than I intended.
> 
> Thank you so much for all your kindness, support and kudos, there's been such an unbelievably positive reaction to this fic, and it's so exciting! I hope you enjoy this chapter.

Darcy practically skips up the stone steps towards the mansion that afternoon with a massive smile on her face, feeling like she’s walking on air.  She definitely wasn’t expecting Bucky to kiss her last night, but he did, and it was _fantastic_.  Just thinking about their new relationship sends warm feeling spreading through her body, leaving her tingly and relaxed from her core to her fingertips – although, that might actually be the effect of starting the day with orgasms.

Bucky has skills.

Either way, she’s riding the wave of budding romance in all its dewy newness, and she’s certain that there is absolutely nothing that can stop this day from being utterly wonder-

BOOM!

Darcy sprints up the last few steps, through the front door and up the stairs, heading for the second floor, where she saw a bright flash in one of the windows.  She almost bumps into Cain on her way there, who’s running in the same direction as she is, but with a shit-eating grin on his face.

“Let me guess,” she pants as she falls into step next to him, “Charles?”

His answering cackle is all the response she needs, and she rolls her eyes.  _At least he seems to be in a good mood._

When they reach the first floor, the site of the blast turns out to be one of the mansion’s many sitting rooms.  The housekeeper is already there, accompanied by the butler, who’s wild-eyed and shouting something nonsensical, and two shrieking maids.

“Everybody _shut up_!” Darcy yells, and everyone turns to her in shock – apart from Cain, who looks positively gleeful.

A few puffs of smoke waft across the threshold, and she can hear the distinctive crackle of flames somewhere inside.  She turns to Ellen, who, though far from calm, is the least hysterical of the little crowd.

“I presume this is Charles’s fault?”

Ellen nods mutely.

“So where is he?”

Ellen’s head swings back around to face the sitting room.  The sitting room which is currently on fire.

Darcy gapes at Ellen.  “ _Are you shitting me?_ ”

Without waiting for an answer, she darts inside.  She quickly spots the source of the flames, a small but complicated titration set on a low coffee table.  Fortunately, the fire is still small, and the smoke minimal.  Coughing slightly, eyes prickling, she casts about until she sees a throw flung over a couch.  With a desperate prayer that it’s not made of anything flammable, she snags it and flings it flat over the fire.  Grateful that she’s wearing sturdy shoes, she stamps on it until the flames are smothered.

Still spluttering and waving her hand in front of her face to dispel the lingering smoke, she peers about for Charles.  For a moment, ice lances through her body as she spots his skinny little body lying flat on the floor a couple of feet away.

As she falls to her knees at his side he groans and pushes himself up on his elbows, and she lets out a rush of air through her mouth.  She slumps down onto her thighs as the others rush into the room, and she glares up at them.  The fire wasn’t _that_ bad.  Would it really have been too much to ask for one of them to run in and retrieve Charles?  Were they really going to just hover around outside until he died from smoke inhalation, or suffered third-degree burns?

Charles is rubbing his forehead with the heel of his hand.  Beyond looking even more dishevelled than usual, he doesn’t look too much the worse for wear, but the sight of him lying inert on the floor is still fresh in her mind, so she pulls him into her lap and rubs up and down his back comfortingly.  It’s as much to reassure herself as it is to calm him.  His twiggy arms wind around her neck and he burrows deeper into her lap.  She’s quickly learning that he’s really quite cuddly if you give him the opportunity.  But seriously, if getting knocked on his ass by explosions bothers him so much, he ought to think his experiments through a little more.  Meeting Cain’s gaze over Charles’ head, she can see he’s thinking the same thing, and rolls her eyes.  Cain stifles a snigger, and their audience looks appalled.

For a couple of minutes she strokes Charles’ hair and hums soothing noises.  Eventually, she decides he’s recovered enough from his shock and pulls back to look at him, steeling herself for what she’s about to do.  She’s determined not to be swayed by his big doe eyes and general cuteness.  Not at all.

“Charles,” she says, and when she thinks about how badly he could have been hurt, even killed, she finds she doesn’t need to fake the hard edge to her voice.  “What, in God’s name were you thinking?”

Really, she should have known better.  Months of interning for Jane should have taught her not to ask that question.  Charles opens his mouth, and pure Science! pours out.  It flows over her as she sits there, with Charles still in her lap, Cain and the household staff standing around, and she has no clue what he’s talking about.  That is, until a certain word catches her ear.

“Caesium?  Charles, _what were you doing with Caesium?_ ”  She’s trying very hard not to shout, but it’s difficult.

“I was using it as a catalyst, for the other metal oxides, so that…” Charles begins, but trails off when it clicks that the question was rhetorical.

Darcy stares down at him incredulously.  _How can someone so smart be so stupid?_

Charles seems to shrink in her lap, and if he had puppy ears, they would be pressed flat to his head by now.

“Well, _no wonder it exploded!_ ” she finally bursts out.  She considers asking how the hell he even got a hold of one of the most volatile materials on Earth, but decides she doesn’t want to know.

She stands, lifting him onto his feet.

“You know, Charles, I baked some cookies this morning, and I brought some with me to share with you boys.  Now, though, it looks like it’ll just be me and Cain eating them,” she tells him with a regretful sigh.

Charles gazes up at her with wide, hurt eyes and a trembling chin, and she wants to wince.  “What?” he asks in a very quiet voice, and Darcy feels like a monster.

“Charlie,” she says, trying to soften the blow, “you set fire to the sitting room.  Be glad I haven't come up with a worse punishment.”

Those big brown eyes seems to grow even more chocolatey, and she swallows.  _He’s not_ actually _a puppy,_ she reminds herself.  _Stand your ground.  It’s for his own safety.  Ignore the puppy-eyes, ignore them…_

Charles shuffles closer and tugs hopefully on her hand.

“Nuh-uh, mister,” she admonishes, sounding more convinced than she feels.  “You could have been killed.  No cookies for you.”

Charles _droops_.  For the rest of the afternoon, he trails along behind her, looking forlorn, and refuses to engage with her and Cain no matter what games she tries to entice him with.  Cain can’t stop grinning until she gives him a dressing-down about enjoying other people’s misery and reminds him of his brother’s gracious acceptance of his apology the day before.  He sighs, arranges his features into a more neutral expression – and proceeds to munch on a cookie.  Darcy looks daggers at him until he puts it away with a huff and a scowl.

Darcy tries to ignore the whispers and the dark looks from the other staff.  She wonders if anyone’s ever told Charles off before.  Clearly, giving Cain a second chance and depriving Charles of baked goods are crimes punishable by glaring.  She is being glared at with extreme prejudice.

Finally, evening creeps up on them and they find themselves in a first-floor living room (thankfully free of scorch marks).  Darcy and Cain are trying to concentrate on a game of backgammon while Charles sits alone in a corner, turned slightly away from them and picking at the edge of the rug.  It’s such a classically mopey pose that Darcy has to press her lips together to keep from giggling.

Cain, on the other hand, seems to have got over the novelty of his brother being punished and is growing irritated instead.

“If he keeps this up much longer, actual thunderclouds are gonna start raining on his head.  How long is he gonna sulk?”

“I don’t know,” Darcy replies with a wry twist of her lips.  “Why don’t you ask him?”

The notion baffles Cain for a moment, then he looks over at Charles.  “Oi, Grumpy!  Stop being such a wet blanket and get over here!”

His words are rough, but Darcy’s pleasantly surprised at the invitation he’s extended to his brother.

Charles squirms, mutters something unintelligible, and tries desperately to hang on to his dark mood.

Cain blows out his cheeks in exasperation.  “Oh, for the love of God, you’re such a whiner.  Just come and play, already.”

Charles mumbles again.  Apparently Adult-Charles is on vacation today.

“What was that, sweetie?” Darcy asks in her kindest voice.

“You really want me to come play?”

“Of course, honey,” Darcy says.

“Anything’s better than you grouching,” Cain says at the same time, but it does the trick.  Charles shuffles over on his hands and knees, crawls into Darcy’s lap and takes over her side at backgammon.  He soundly beats Cain three times, which does wonders for his mood, while Cain’s grows surlier and surlier.  Eventually, in the interests of peace-keeping, because Cain looks ready to throw the whole board at the wall, Darcy relents and feeds them both cookies.

Charles continues to cheer up, and when Cain heads off to the bathroom, Darcy pounces.

“Charlie,” she begins.  She’s decided she likes the diminutive.  It suits him, small and loveable as he is.  “I know you think I was mean earlier, but you have to know I was only looking out for you.  I would hate to see you hurt.”

Charles, who tensed when she started, relaxes again.  He’s still firmly ensconced in her lap and apparently has no intention of budging, so she can feel his every muscle movement.  He nods meekly.

“Good boy,” she says, and kisses him on the cheek.  “In future, if you wanna do an experiment, that’s fine, but run it by me first, ok?  I can help with safety.”

He nods again.  “Because you worked for a scientist,” he agrees.

“That’s right,” she responds, then pauses.  Did she tell him that?  She told Cain she was Jane’s assistant, but…

“Cain told me,” Charles blurts.

“Alright,” she says uncertainly.

Cain returns, interrupting them, and demands a rematch.  The kids begin yet another game of backgammon, which quickly disintegrates into bickering and name-calling, and Darcy pinches the bridge of her nose and prays for patience.

She should be glad, really.  At least they’re talking to each other, even if it is only to fling insults.  She gets the impression that they used to just ignore each other, or glare silently.  They’re steadily finding a rhythm and a familiarity in the midst of their arguing that she should be grateful for.  It’s… kind of brotherly.

That doesn’t make it any less headache-inducing, though, and Darcy’s legs went to sleep ages ago, but she doesn’t have the heart to tell Charles to get off.  Fortunately, he takes pity on her without her having to say anything and slithers onto the floor.  Massaging her numb calves, she distracts herself with blissful thoughts of Bucky.

_Bucky follows Darcy into the bathroom and locks the door behind him.  His appreciative gaze rakes up and down, from her head to her toes._

_“Have I told you how crazy it makes me to see you in my clothes, doll?”_

_Darcy glances down at herself.  Sure enough, she’s wearing one of Bucky’s oversized cotton shirts, plain and dark blue.  She’s pretty small, while Bucky’s over six foot and well-built, so it swamps her.  When they bought her new clothes, both she and Steve completely forgot about pyjamas, and Bucky offered her his shirts for the time being.  Since then, he’s made a couple of half-hearted suggestions that she should find herself some proper nightclothes, but Darcy has objected every time, claiming she’s comfortable, so there’s no point wasting their money.  In truth, she gets a thrill out of knowing she’s wearing something that belongs to Bucky, and isn't ready to give that up yet.  Not to mention, she hasn't missed the way Bucky’s eyes darken when he catches sight of her in the evenings and early mornings, before she’s dressed.  She’s started finding excuses to delay putting on her day clothes until later and later in the day._

_Now, standing in front of the sink, watching Bucky watch her, she shifts and is rewarded with the sight of him licking his lips as the fabric drags over her breasts.  Within the new parameters of their relationship, it still sends electricity down her spine to think that she’s wearing his clothes, but there a comfortable_ rightness _to it all of a sudden._

_“You never said, but I knew.”  She smiles at him, catlike, and he attempts a shocked expression._

_“Minx.”  He shakes his head regretfully.  “I’m lovin’ this view, but… washin’ is traditionally done naked.  It’s gonna have to come off.”_

_Darcy folds her arms under her breasts, sniggering as his eyes drop away from her face.  “You first.”  She’s shooting for a challenging tone, trying to cover up her sudden rush of nerves, but she doesn’t quite succeed.  His face softens in understanding, and she gives him a small smile filled with grateful affection._

_Without complaint, he reaches behind his head and tugs off his shirt.  Manual labour down at the docks combined with an enthusiasm for amateur boxing have done wonders for his physique.  She’s caught herself staring at the mouth-watering aesthetic of his biceps before now, and spent late nights imagining the full masterpiece hinted at just below the edge of his neckline.  Faced with the real deal, her dreams pale in comparison.  She barely has enough time to enjoy the view before he pulls down his boxers and her mouth goes dry.  The effect she has on him is immediately obvious – and what an effect it is._

_The bathroom is miniscule, with barely enough room for one person, let alone two.  It only takes a small step from Bucky for him to be pressed right up against her where she can feel him, hard against her stomach._

_“Feel that, Darce?” he whispers in her ear.  “Feel what you do to me?  You’re so fuckin’ beautiful, doll, wanna see all of you… let me see you…”_

_He nips at her earlobe and his fingers brush against the sides of her breasts, and now Darcy can’t get naked fast enough, she’s so desperate to feel his hands on her skin._

_She expects him to touch her, but instead he stares, pupils blown, taking in every inch of her bare body._

_“Fuck, doll,” he chokes out.  His left hand comes up to sink into her hair, and his right runs down her waist, lightly, almost reverently.  It’s enough to make her shiver, but nothing more, and she whines, rubbing up against him.  He chuckles, and the sound rumbles through her, making her eyes flutter closed.  “Shh, gorgeous, ‘m gonna take care of you…”_

_He bands an arm around her waist and tugs her into the shower with him, pulling the curtain behind them and reaching around her to turn the water on.  Darcy gasps as the cold water hits them, but Bucky holds her close, sharing his body heat until it warms up._

_She pulls back to examine him: his dark hair tousled by sleep and her fingers, his sharp cheekbones, the wicked curve of his smirk and the sparkle in his light blue eyes.  Her hands take on a life of their own, stroking over his shoulders and down across the muscles of his chest, hard and well-defined under her touch._

_He’s sublime and real and all hers, and suddenly she feels her confidence spike.  She wants to_ do _things to him._

_“A few months ago,” she says, her conversational tone marred by huskiness, “I was sure I’d met the most attractive man in existence.  Boy, was I wrong.”  And it’s true.  Thor was… hunky, that’s for sure, and she experienced a healthy dose of fantasies about his abs and his blond locks.  But since falling into the past, her favourite Norse god has been replaced in her imagination by dark hair and a Brooklyn drawl._

_“Oh yeah?” Bucky replies, a little breathlessly.  “This new fella, he must be quite somethin’.”  His tone is teasing, but there’s a slight uncertainty to it, and she has to do something about that immediately._

_“He really is,” she tells him, sliding her hand all the way down and curling her fingers around him until he’s biting his lip to suppress a moan and bracing one hand against the beige tiles.  “And the best part?  He’s_ my _fella.”  She lets a little Brooklyn creep into her voice.  There’s something heady about using his accent and his 1940s slang to claim him as hers.  In the context of the world she finds herself in, this time of stickball and typewriters and victory rolls, it’s a hundred times more meaningful than ‘boyfriend’.  As his lips crash into hers and he muffles his groans against her mouth as she twists her wrist, she knows he’s on the same page.  “You are one beautiful man, Bucky Barnes,” she tells him as her lips leave his.  “And seeing you like this?  Sexiest fucking thing_ ever. _”  He comes with a shout and she presses her palm to his mouth, purring soothing words in his ear as she strokes him through it.  “Shh, honey, quiet, don’t wanna wake Stevie…”_

_They stand under the spray for a minute, Bucky panting against her neck as he comes down, Darcy pressing her thighs together for some meagre relief.  She wasn’t kidding; Bucky’s arousal was the most stimulating thing she’s ever seen._

_“I didn’t have you pegged for a screamer.”  She can’t resist provoking him._

_The look he gives her sends a fresh coil of heat to her belly and she shudders.  He sucks her bottom lip into his mouth, nipping with his teeth then soothing with his tongue.  At the same time, his fingertips caress her breasts, callouses catching on her nipples until she’s whimpering and rutting against his thigh.  He pulls back to grin at her, knowing he’s back in control._

_“You're pretty noisy yourself, baby doll.   An’ I’ve barely even begun…”_

_A whine escapes her throat at his words, and his fingers_ finally _find her folds._

_“Don’ worry,” he growls, low in his throat, “I’ve got somethin’ to prove.  I'm sure as hell not gonna leave my best girl wantin’.”_

_His words make her light-headed with happiness.  “I’m your best gir- ah!”_

_Coherent thought escapes her as his fingers press into her, and all she can do is cling to his shoulders, her breasts pressed right up against his chest, as her knees buckle and she’s held up only by his arm around her waist._

_He trails kisses down her neck as his fingers crook and knead and she’s making even more noise than he did but he’s doing nothing to help her keep quiet._

_Bastard._

_Her gaze locks on to the bronze shower knobs; she clings to the feel of the water rolling down her body, focussing on anything to distract from Bucky’s skin in her, on her, around her, to keep her voice in check, but then her vision goes white and she gives in to the sensation._

_After a few swallows, she gets her mouth working again and repeats her question.  “I’m your best girl?”_

_Bucky kisses her on the nose._

_“An’ I'm your fella.”_

Darcy takes a deep breath and returns her attention to her young charges.  Cain is squinting at Charles’ face, snapping his fingers in front of his nose.

Charles has an extremely confused frown creasing his face, which is slightly pink.

“Charlie?  You ok, honey?”

Opening his mouth, Charles starts to reply, but then his gaze flicks to something over Darcy’s shoulder and his words falter.

“You must be the new nanny.  Darcy Lewis, is it?” a friendly, cultured voice from behind her asks.

Cain freezes in place, and Darcy knows exactly who she’s about to meet.  She wishes she could put this off until _never_ , knowing that when she turns around she’s going to have a hard time not ripping this man’s face off.

She arms herself with thoughts of Bucky, of his lips on hers, of his laugh, his hair sweeping over his forehead.  She cloaks herself in daydreams of him, drawing them tight around her and praying that it’ll be enough to keep her calm.

She turns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a cliffhanger, I know, I'm sorry! Next chapter: Darcy tries to be polite to Kurt Marko, all while having violent fantasies about killing him and hiding his body.
> 
> I hope the smut wasn't too weird - like I said, I've never tried to write it before!
> 
> This plot is moving much slower than I intended it to, so this fic is probably gonna go on forever. Like, I can't even guess what the final word count is gonna be at this point. Ah well, it's giving me time for some character development, which I hope you're enjoying!


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy meets Kurt Marko.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, finally. I'm sorry for leaving you guys hanging on that cliffhanger for so many days - I know this is the longest it's taken me to update in a while. This chapter was so hard to write, and I'm still not happy with it. I kept getting so stuck. The number of times I've edited it is insane, and it's not even that long. 
> 
> But it's not going to get any better at this point, so here it is.

Kurt Marko is friendly and jovial and genial and he makes Darcy’s skin crawl.

At first glance, he’s an attractive older man.  His dark auburn hair is expensively-coiffed and his bright green eyes have smile lines around the edges.  An expensive suit hangs off his broad shoulders.

Upon closer inspection, however, Darcy notes that his eyes are a little too far apart, his chin a little too weak, his hairline receding.  His lips are too full for his otherwise angular features, and she can see the beginnings of a paunch through the suit that probably fit him perfectly a few years ago.  He steps forward for a handshake – _weak, limp –_ and she drinks in every imperfection she can find, cataloguing each one in her mind with a vindictive pleasure.

He raises an eyebrow at her – _too bushy, almost a monobrow_ – and she realises that she hasn’t answered him yet.

“Yes, Darcy Lewis.  That’s right.”  Then, because it’s a social nicety and she has to, she adds, “Pleasure to meet you, sir,” although nothing’s ever made her feel so dirty in her entire life.

He laughs.  His smile hasn’t slipped, despite her flat tone.  “Oh come now, none of that.  Call me Kurt.  You’ve made quite the impression on my wife.  She says our boys are very taken with you.”  His voice is deep.  _But not rich, not like Bucky’s; not clear and cool like Steve’s.  Thin.  Reedy._ “I must say, if that’s true, I'm very impressed.  Many nannies haven't even lasted a day, but you seem quite in your element, according to what I’ve heard.”  He leans forward conspiratorially.  “Tell me, Darcy, what’s your secret?”

Charles has crept forward and hooked his fingers into Darcy’s skirt, and she can’t help a glance in Cain’s direction.  He’s still fixed in place, unmoving, eyes locked on his father and his face expressionless.  A memory of their first meeting flits across her mind, when she’d thought him entitled and spoiled.  She’s never been so wrong.  It was a defence mechanism, just like his blank motionlessness now.  The logic is clear: if he doesn’t move, there’s nothing to punish.

She wonders if that’s ever stopped Kurt.

“Basic human decency,” she blurts out before she can stop herself.  Kurt is still smiling, although he looks a little puzzled.  It makes her want to slap him.  And keep slapping, until the confusion is gone, and the smile, and all his skin–

She forces herself to smile sweetly, although it probably comes out looking sickly.  “I mean, basic understanding of kids.  Establishing firm boundaries, getting to know each other, building a friendship… it’s easy, really.”  She cuts herself off before she starts rambling, or shouting, or clawing at his face with her fingernails.

“Yes… However, I have always found proper discipline to be a greater priority than… _friendship_ when dealing with children.”

She can see it in her mind’s eye: _leaping at him, digging her fingers into his eyes and gouging them out before he even knows what’s happening…_

Charles’ knuckles knock against her leg, bringing her back to the present.

“Have you, now.”  Darcy’s tone is flat.

“Naturally.  One must be strict with troublemakers.  For their own good, you see.  Like the Good Book says, spare the rod and spoil the child, yes?  It’s the only language they understand.”

Electricity crackles under her skin.

“And here I’ve been using English all these years.  Silly me.”  Darcy kicks herself the moment the words are out of her mouth, but the friendly smile never wavers.  Her right palm itches, the urge to slap it off his polite, unfeeling face growing stronger.

**_Scraping at his cheeks, ripping his ears..._ **

She swallows, vaguely aware that the voice in her head doesn’t sound entirely _hers_ anymore.  There’s a new quality to it, an otherness.  It’s not exactly a sound, more of a… colouring.

“Oh?  Do you have much experience with children?”  At Darcy’s silence, Kurt continues, “You have been employed before, have you not?”

“I worked for an astrophysicist,” she replies, with some relief.  It’s a safer topic; maybe it’ll give her a moment to collect herself.  Live wires are igniting under her skin, impossible to ignore.

“Ah!  Perfect.  You and Charles will get along well.  He’s quite the little scientist, our boy.”  His gaze finally lifts from Darcy’s face, acknowledging Charles’ presence in the room.  He gives him a look he probably thinks is fond, but comes off calculating, greedy.

Darcy’s right hand twitches again with the urge to strike him, and she curls it into a fist, fingernails digging into the purple symbol through her gloves.

Charles shifts closer, pressing against Darcy’s hip.

“Mm,” she agrees, not trusting herself with words.

“His genius is a gift.  One only _he_ was blessed with, sadly.”  He casts a dismissive glance in Cain’s direction, and Darcy sees the boy grow even tenser.  Kurt ploughs on.  “It’s natural balance, I suppose.  One clever one makes up for one stupid one, right?”

**_Tearing his skin…_ **

The itch in her right palm has become a burn and she clamps her fist harder, sure the symbol must be glowing by now.  Her breathing is growing erratic, and electricity is buzzing in her throat.  If she tries to speak now, her words might spark and fizzle.

Her lack of response doesn’t seem to faze Kurt.  “An astrophysicist, huh?  Perhaps I’ve heard of him.  What’s his name?”

“Her,” Darcy grits out, feeling a swell of righteous indignation on Jane’s behalf.  Then she remembers that it’s impossible for Kurt to have any idea who Dr Foster is, and she’s going to have to downplay her importance.  “Dr Jane Foster.”  Despite the hopelessness of the situation, she can’t resist emphasising her friend’s title.  “I doubt you would know her.”  She tries not to talk through clenched teeth.

There’s pressure building, in her head and in her hand, each one feeding into the other in a continuous, very distracting loop.

Kurt’s smile turns patronising.  “No, I suppose not.  Astrophysics is a challenging field.  Has she considered switching to one more suited to a gentle temperament?”  He speaks with the air of one imparting ancient wisdom.

Darcy resists a snort.  There’s nothing gentle about Jane’s temperament.

**_Biting, scratching, kicking…_ **

_Or mine right now, apparently._

“She’s doing what she loves,” she says simply.

“A noble intention,” Kurt nods grandly.  “I had an aptitude for the sciences myself, in school.  But, family duties called, and my focus was needed elsewhere.  I make it a point to be active in the community, though.  I am funding an organisation at the moment, in fact.  Their scientific endeavours are going to take us into the next century.”  He puffs up like a balloon, and Darcy wants to sneer at his pride.

She rubs her fingertips along her symbol, her Helm of Awe, trying to ease the blistering heat now sending shocks up her arm.  It’s making her head fuzzy.  Her vision is blurring and ringing is sounding in her ears.

**_Slash, rip, rend…_ **

“I have to go home,” she says suddenly, and from the look on Kurt’s face she thinks maybe she cut across a grand speech about all the good he’s doing for humanity.  Well, if she doesn’t melt the house with her powers, and Charles doesn’t set it ablaze with his genius, at least they can count on Kurt to blow it up with the size of his ego.

He recovers quickly, offering to see her out.  She starts for the door and is in the hall before she realises Charles has moved with her, still clinging to her skirt.  He doesn’t appear to be planning to let go until she leaves.

When she looks down at him, his face is pale and bloodless, a stark contrast to the vicious satisfaction on his face.  He throws her a bare-toothed smile, but she’s too busy concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other without springing for Kurt’s jugular to be bemused.

Somehow she makes it down the stairs, the waves crashing in her ears blissfully drowning out the voice of the odious man at her side.  Her knees shake, with white-hot fury or suppressed lightning, she doesn’t know, and every time she stumbles Charles is there, gripping her hand with his tiny fingers.  She squeezes his shoulder gratefully.

After a decade-long trek she’s out the front door, hearing herself force out clipped goodbyes, giving Charles a too-tight hug if his surprised yelp is any indication, and staggering into her leather seat when Donald holds the car door open for her.

“Darcy?”

She realises she’s cradling her head in her hands, taking breaths that are doing absolutely nothing to calm her.

“Darcy?  You ok, girlie?”

She continues to ignore Donald, who lets out a concerned hum but starts to drive.  He keeps trying to get her attention, but she doesn’t look up.

She’s sure if she does, her eyes will be purple.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew. Yeah, not happy with this chapter. Unfortunately, the next chapter is also proving quite difficult, but hopefully I'll get through it soon and post it.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy deals with her anger for Kurt and has an unexpected conversation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter wasn’t quite as hard to write as the last one, but it was still really difficult. It just kept morphing into something different, so, as with everything I produce, this is way different from what I had in my head at the start.  
> Anyway, I hope this answers some questions you may have had.
> 
> Thank you all for the lovely supportive comments and the kudos. I have so many now! It’s so exciting!

The ride home is agony.

Darcy’s anger refuses to abate.  It’s taken on a life of its own, become sentient.  A tangible, purple lightning ricocheting around her body.  She squeezes her right hand tight around the Helm of Awe on her palm, willing it to calm the storm inside her.  For the first time, she feels the reality of her power, its ancient energy, its provenance.  It is of Asgard, like Thor.  How could a mortal girl ever hope to control it?

She remembers Mjolnir, and the ease with which Thor wielded its power.  She was foolish enough to think, then, that Mjolnir belonged to Thor, but now she realises she was wrong.  Finally, she understands what it meant that Thor was unable to pick up the hammer as a human.  Mjolnir deemed him unworthy; it only returned to Thor once he had proven himself.  Mjolnir was in charge, not Thor.

 _Thor_.  A Norse god, thousands of years old, battle-hardened and fierce.  Even he couldn’t hope to dominate Mjolnir, only form a partnership.

How could she have treated her own Asgardian power like a toy?

Darcy draws her knees up to her chest and burrows into her seat, hoping to contain the furious energy inside her, and ignores the worried looks Donald shoots her way.

What a fool she’s been.  All this time she’s been either excited about having superpowers, or complacent, focussing on her job and Bucky and Steve and ignoring the fact that _her body has completely changed._

She should have been frightened by her powers.

Like now.

And she’s not just scared by what she _can_ do, but by what she _wants_ to do.  Back at the mansion, she wanted to kill Kurt.  And she was struggling to hold on.  She was so desperate to get out of there before she did something irreversible, she barely said goodbye to Charles; she definitely didn’t say anything to Cain.

Oh, Cain.  So young, so vulnerable, so afraid.  The image of him, huddled in the corner, defensively stiff and silent and blank, comes back to her, along with a fresh wave of anger towards Kurt.  Even now, she can feel the Helm whispering to her, lilac words blossoming and curling through her mind, silent and deafening, smooth and rough.  Beautiful and deadly.

**_Go back.  Shock him, hurt him._ **

Has she always been such an angry person?

**_It’s the right thing to do._ **

**_He’ll never touch Cain again._ **

That’s true…

No.  This isn't her.  She’s not this person.

**_He’s a monster.  The world needs fewer monsters._ **

**_Make him suffer.  He deserves to know pain._ **

_I don’t get to decide that!_

**_Burn him_ **

**_Melt his skin_ **

**_Scorch his flesh_ **

**_Fryhimroasthimkillhim_ **

_Nononononono_

**_Go BACK_ **

**_KILL HIM_ **

“Donald.”

“Darcy!  Finally.  Girlie, I was really startin’ ter worry abou–”

“Drop me off here.”

“What?  But we’re not –”

“It’s fine.  Stop the car.”

They roll to a halt and Darcy spills out onto the sidewalk.  She doesn’t even glance back at Donald, just starts walking.  She winces.  She’ll have to be extra sweet to him tomorrow.  Now, though, she just needs to get somewhere safe.  Somewhere quiet.

She can’t go back to the apartment like this.  Not till she’s calmed down, got a handle on herself.  She feels the bolts of purple shooting around inside her, threatening to burst out of her skin, threatening to destroy everything in her path.

Exposing Bucky and Steve to this danger?  Unacceptable.

Her lungs begin to burn as she walks faster and faster, her head bowed to hide the purple tint in her eyes.

Almost blind, she stumbles along, past Bucky’s favourite barber shop, over the bridge over the Gowanus Canal, under the rows of washing lines strung across the narrow divide between apartment buildings, barely noticing how familiar her feet have become with these streets in the past few weeks.

Somewhere isolated.  She has to get somewhere with fewer people.

After about half an hour – or maybe a few days, she doesn’t even know at this point – she looks up to realises she’s unconsciously made her way to the little yard behind the library where she first discovered her lightning.

She starts pacing in circles around the yard, trying to burn off the energy fizzing inside her, but it only mounts further.  Her circles become tighter and tighter until she’s practically spinning on the spot, feeling dizzy and sick and disoriented, and oh-so-full, like she could seek out and destroy all her enemies with ease, burn HYDRA to the ground and listen to Kurt’s agonised screams and incinerate those back-alley rapists from her first night here and then move on, to the Red Skull and the Nazis and the whole of Germany while she was at it and Japan, definitely Japan, stop Pearl Harbour from ever happening –

Darcy hunkers down on the spot, burying her face between her knees and wrapping her hands around the back of her head.  Her breath comes in panicked gasps.  The power is building inside her, ancient and so much bigger and stronger than her, pushing at her skin, trying to burst through.  It hurts so much, the same searing agony she felt when the Power Stone first touched her as she fell through the portal, and she longs to rip her glove off, shove her hand towards the sky and just _let go._ Maybe then the burning in her veins will cease, the lightning will stop trying to break through her skin, and she’ll be able to just pass out into blissful _nothingness._

Only a tiny remaining shred of self-preservation holds her back; the small part of her rational brain still working reminds her of the potential destruction of letting it all out.  She can’t bring herself to care about the property damage or the human cost, just how there will be no avoiding detection after such a display.

And anything HYDRA does to her will probably be ten times worse than anything she’s feeling right now.

So she’s trapped, unable to go home, her muscles locked in place, forced to keep a lid on a power burning her up from within, and barely managing to breathe.

She’s shaky and sobbing and terrified of her own thoughts and she just wants to go home, home to her boys, and bury her head in Bucky’s chest and tell him everything and let him hold her while she cries until she calms down –

_But she doesn’t know how to calm down._

And when she opens her mouth she can’t form words because there’s electricity crackling between her teeth and the Helm is lighting up and threatening to burn through her white gloves and if she moves even an inch right now she might shatter into a thousand violet sparks.

_I have to calm down.  I have to calm down.  I have tocalmdown IhavetocalmdownIhavetocalmdown_

_calmdowncalmdowncalmdowncalmdowncalmcalmcalmcalmcalm_

**_Why?_ **

Darcy’s eyes fly open in shock.

_Did you – did you just –_

**_Why?_ **

_Are you_ talking _?  To_ me _?_

Sure, she’s been feeling like the voice wasn’t entirely her own, but the idea of an entirely different entity inside her head, actually communicating with her, is… actually kinda useful.  Maybe she can work with this.  The panic starts to recede, just a little.

 _Why what?_ she asks tentatively.

**_Why must you stay calm?_ **

_Well… because… because I might destroy a lot of… stuff… if I don’t.  And that would be bad._

**_Why?_ **

_Why WHAT?_

Ok, so maybe shouting at the violent, ancient power steadily consuming her body isn't the best plan but… being consumed _hurts_ , dammit, and she’s running low on patience.

**_Why would it be bad?_ **

_I don’t want to hurt anyone.  Obviously._

**_Lie._ **

_What the fuck?_

Her head is pounding.  This conversation isn't going as well as she had hoped, and the panic is creeping back, slowly but surely.

**_You lie.  You wish to hurt this… Kurt Marko.  You wish to make him suffer, to kill him._ **

_That’s… that’s what_ you _want, not me!  You’re the one who was telling me to electrocute him, even after I left, you wanted me to go back just so I could murder him!_

**_You are mistaken.  This was your desire, not mine.  I have no desires._ **

What?  This is far too confusing to deal with while her whole body is still screaming in agony.

_I don’t get it.  At all.  Do you think you could… like, turn off the full-body fireworks, just for a little while?  While we work this out?_

**_I cannot._ **

_What the fuck?  Of course you can!  You’re the one who started this, you can make it stop._

**_You do not understand.  You are wrong to think I have a mind of my own, a will.  I am guided by your emotions._ **

_…Who_ are _you?_

**_I am Power._ **

_The Helm of Awe?_

**_The Helm is merely a symbol, a manifestation of my presence.  I am Power.  Ancient.  Absolute._ **

_I… I don’t…_  There’s something niggling away in the back of Darcy’s brain, a memory, half-forgotten, nebulous.  She grasps for it, but it slips away.  She’s too confused, in too much agony, too tired…

**_Like the universe, my siblings and I have always existed.  Space.  Mind.  Reality.  Soul.  Time.  And Power.  We were here long before you were born, and will continue long after you are dust in the ground.  We are eternal.  Infinite._ **

Finally, it hits her.  A quiet desert night, listening to Thor describe the mysteries of the universe.  Technically she knew that it was the same stuff Jane always went on about, but when Thor spoke, poetry fell from his lips.  He knew _so much._   And when _he_ talked about it, it didn’t feel like physics. 

It felt like magic.

So she was entranced.  And she listened.

And now, she remembers.

 _You’re an Infinity Stone!_  Her triumph cuts through her pain momentarily, and she has a second of relief to feel extraordinarily pleased with herself before the burning surges back through her body with a vengeance.  Losing her balance, she topples over sideways onto the hard concrete and lies there in a shuddering ball, almost missing Power’s response.

**_Almost.  I am an offshoot, a part of the original Stone sent through time and space to find_ you _, Darcy Lewis._**

_Huh?_

**_Sometimes, the Infinity Stones must send out parts of themselves, to seek out hosts and imbue them with what we have to offer.  So it is decreed by the norns._ **

The norns.  She remembers them, too, from Thor’s teachings.  Like the Greek Fates, only… Norse.

_Why me?_

**_That, I do not know.  However, a mortal host is… rare._ **

This is… a lot to take in.  And too much to deal with when her nerve endings are still on fire.  Speaking of…

 _So, can we get back to the part where you stop filling me up with all this electricity?  I’d like to go home sometime today, and be, you know,_ not _in agony, and you’re kinda preventing that._

**_I have already told you.  I am not doing this.  You are.  I have no will; I only follow yours._ **

There’s no emotion behind the words.  No impatience, no exasperation.  Just a statement of fact, flowing wine-coloured through her brain.

_Uh-huh.  And what is my will?_

**_To kill Kurt Marko._ **

_The fuck?!  Are we still on this?  I do NOT want to kill Kurt._

**_Yes, you do._ **

_Oh, God.  I have my very own Mr Hyde, inciting me to evil._

**_I am neither good nor evil.  I am Power.  I am guided by your desires._ **

_And you think my desire is to murder?_

**_You wish to punish and remove as a threat any who would hurt those you love._ **

Darcy thinks about that.  Really thinks about it.  And she realises, yes, she really does want Kurt Marko dead.  She wants him to feel a hundred times the pain he’s ever inflicted on Cain, and then she wants to kill him.

_Was I always this… dark?_

**_Power,_** the voice whispers.

And she understands.

_Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely._

**_Yes.  I have not changed your nature; I have simply given you the tools you were previously lacking to carry out your wishes._ **

_So… I’ve always had murderous tendencies?_ She’s trying for a light tone, but even in her head, her voice trembles.

**_No.  You have always been protective.  You now have the Power to protect through the taking of lives, and you are tempted._ **

Darcy mulls this over.

 _But wanting to do something and actually doing it are two very different things.  So…_ should _I kill him?_

No answer.  Apparently, she’s on her own.

Really, though, she already knows the truth.  She’s not a murderer.  It would be nice if all her problems from now on could be solved this easily, with a little help from Power, but she didn’t make it through almost a whole degree in Political Science without understanding that one person cannot elect themselves judge, jury and executioner.  There’s no justice in that.

She’ll just have to find another way to protect Cain.  One way or another, Kurt Marko will never lay a hand on his son again.

Which just leaves one problem: stopping the pain.  If her anger is fuelling Power, then she’s hurting herself.  Logically, all she has to do is not be angry anymore.

 _Easier said than done_.  A slideshow of Cain, rigid and fearful, Kurt, smiling and smug, and that damn switch in that dull, bare bedroom is playing on repeat behind her eyelids.

She takes a deep, shuddering breath.  _Think about something else, Darcy._

What _doesn’t_ make her angry?

Reaching deep into her mind, she pulls up thoughts of her grandmother, singing her to sleep, wrapping a band-aid around her bleeding finger, telling her stories of her parents.   She moves onto Jane, flitting about the lab, hair in disarray, driving like a lunatic out into the middle of the desert, taking coffee from Darcy with a happy sigh.  Then Erik, equally absent-minded and brilliant but warm like a father, soft-spoken and kind.  Thor, booming and larger than life, hair shining in the sun, wrapping her in a bone-crushing hug and giving his life to defend them.

Steve.  Brave, gentle, fierce Steve.  Throwing himself headfirst into a fight he has no hope of winning, all to help a stranger.  Lending her his own clothes, trying to give her his bed.  Blushing bright red under her teasing.  Looking straight at her with those giant, earnest blue eyes and promising he’ll take care of her, him and Bucky –

Bucky.  Bucky, Bucky BuckyBuckyBucky

Rescuing her in an alley, giving her the space she needs.  Helping her home, taking her in with no complaints, nothing asked in return.  Bandaging her injuries, watching her with ice-blue eyes, flirting quietly.  Smirking at her, his hair brushing against her forehead as he bends towards her.  Holding her as she cries.  Staring at her like she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.  Burying his hands in her hair as he drags her lips to his for a searing kiss, curling his tongue against hers, stealing her breath, pressing her to his chest under the falling water as she shakes apart in his arms with her name on his lips.

Her boys.  Making her feel… safe.

The pain slips away, and the purple that fills her body is cool, peaceful, a soothing balm.  Power is silent.

Darcy relaxes, breathes, and hears her grandmother’s voice inside her head, feels the phantom tingle of her hand patting her on the cheek and reprimanding her for ever doubting herself.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy runs into the HYDRA agents hunting for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the HYDRA agents are back! It's taken me so much longer than I anticipated to get back to these two. These chapters are getting harder to write as I try and keep a hold on all of the different plot threads. I'm terrified of missing something out or forgetting something crucial I need to resolve. Anyway, enjoy!

Darcy wanders slowly through the streets of Brooklyn, enjoying the easy numbness in her limbs after the searing agony of the past hour.  She needs to get home soon – Bucky and Steve are probably wondering where she is – but her mind is still buzzing and she needs the walk to clear her head and sort through all this new information.

Before, she thought she was the one in control of her power – and she still kind of is.  But it’s Power with a capital ‘P’: a piece of an actual Infinity Stone, sent through time and space to find _her_ by the norns themselves.  She’s still trying to process the thought of Power as a separate being living inside her, like a parasite.  Sort of.  It has a voice, and seems to be somewhat sentient, and yet it claims not to have a will or mind of its own.  It’s a lot to take in.

The idea that Power is guided by her emotions is slightly reassuring, but mostly terrifying.  Feelings aren’t really something she can control, after all; she can’t just decide not to be angry with Kurt anymore.  No more than she can look at Bucky and not remember all the reasons she’s completely in lo–

And _wow_ , is that a thought for later.  When she has less on her plate.

While it’s a relief that she’s not going to be battling with Power for dominance, it’s still scary that she now has to worry about her own mind.  Apparently she’s going to have to think a lot of positive thoughts.  Another episode like today would be dangerous.  And extremely unpleasant.

_Ok.  Just don’t let myself be ruled by my emotions.  Make sure Power only makes an appearance when I need it.  Remember, there’s a huge fucking difference between what I want to do, and what’s right._

And she’s determined to do what’s right.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

Darcy waits for a streetcar to pass before dodging across the road to the safety of the opposite sidewalk.  She’ll be home soon, and now that her thoughts have settled and she’s feeling more secure in her own body, her heart is pounding and she’s almost tripping over her feet in her eagerness to get back to her boys.  After the raw terror of the past couple of hours, the apartment is calling to her like a siren, singing of safety and comfort and the healing balm of her two favourite people, there for her to hug.

She’s absorbed in considering a new beef recipe Martha recommended to her the other day – something involving a creamy white sauce – and coming up with ways to force as much of it as possible down Steve’s skinny throat, and so she doesn’t notice the man she’s about to walk into until it’s almost too late.

Twisting at the last minute so that only her shoulder knocks against his, she looks up to apologise, and has to repress a squeak when she recognises him.  Fortunately, he seems to deem her beneath his notice, and she manages to stumble away without drawing attention to herself.  She ducks under the marquee of a movie theatre and feigns great interest in a poster advertising the coming release of _Tom Brown’s School Days_ , heart hammering in her chest.

Quick, brief glances to her right reveal the two HYDRA agents who were sniffing around the portal site a few weeks ago, now standing only a few feet away from her, looking irritated and disgruntled in the middle of the street.  According to her watch – a pretty, gold hand-me-down from Sarah, who insisted Darcy have it despite her best protests – it’s getting late, gone 10pm.  Even so, the summer sun is barely beginning to show signs of setting, and plenty of pedestrians are still out and about, enjoying the warmth and heading to and from dance halls.

The agents are planted right in the middle of the sidewalk, arguing in hushed tones and ignoring the dirty looks being thrown their way.  It was the redhead she bumped into, and he’s glaring down at something glinting in his partner’s hand like it cancelled Christmas, Thanksgiving and his birthday for the next three years.  Trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible, Darcy cranes her neck at an awkward angle to get a better look, and for a moment, her heart stops.

When she can breathe again, she swallows hard and fixes unseeing, blurry eyes on the poster in front of her.  The Power Stone.  They have the Power Stone, and they’re here.  In Brooklyn.  Where she is.  Where the portal appeared.

She had hoped – although she knew she was only kidding herself – that after three weeks, they would have decided the trail was too cold to discover anything new and given up to go back to their underground lair and torture puppies.  Or whatever it is that agents working for evil Nazi organisations that perform ethically immoral scientific experiments do all day.

Hang on.  When she overheard their conversation last time, they said the Power Stone was drained.  That once it had given its power to a host it was useless.

Darcy side-eyes the agents carefully.  She needs to hear what they’re saying; the only problem is, she’s not sure she trusts herself to use her power right at the moment.  The fear at seeing them again has already sent electricity bubbling to the surface of her skin, and she’s been frantically forcing it back down.  It’s still there, though, simmering away beneath a barrier in her mind, bubble-thin and fragile.  Trying to access her enhanced hearing right now could send her power surging up through the membrane, and set off a chain reaction of disasters.  Ending with her setting fire to Sir Cedric Hardwicke’s stern, paper face, melting the movie theatre marquee and being carted off into the bowls of HYDRA by the two men just six feet to her right, to endure hideous torture and medical experimentation and never to be seen again.

_Oh, hello, bone-shaking terror.  And here I thought I had you under control._

Still… her limbs may be quaking like a new-born lamb’s, but she really needs to know what the agents are up to.  If they’ve figured out who she is, or how to track her… it won’t just be her in danger.

_A new approach, then.  Here goes nothing.  Um… Power?  You there, buddy?_

**_Yes._** Power’s voice blooms in her head, more seen than heard, purple and devoid of intonation.

_I, uh, I really need to eavesdrop on those two, over there, with the red hair and the dark hair.  Normally I wouldn’t have any problem doing that on my own, but right now I, ah…_

**_You are afraid._ **

_Yup.  Pants-wettingly, might-burst-into-tears-any-second petrified.  So, I need you to work with me, here.  Do as I say, not as I feel.  You understand me?_

**_Yes._ **

_Ok, great.  So, would you mind…?_

The street noise around Darcy fades, the laughter and engines and music from the nearby dance hall muting into background sounds, and the rough tones of the redhead ringing clearly in her ears.

“…horse-shit assignment, may as well have us cleaning the latrines, would be more useful than this crap.”

His partner sighs, hard eyes exasperated.  “Well, since our canvassing didn’t turn up anything useful – though how _no one_ can have seen our man that night, I don’t know – we have to resign ourselves to more… unorthodox methods.”

“Unorthodox?  Fairytale bullshit, more like.”

“If Schmidt thinks this is worth a shot, then it’s worth a shot.  Now, if the Stone helps us find the host, we can confirm his identity easily.  The power transfer will have left a mark somewhere on his body, some sort of Norse symbol.”

The redhead snorts.  “Seriously, Myers?  We’ll never reach that bridge, let alone cross it.  You really think Schmidt actually believes that worthless rock is gonna react if it comes near the host?  It’s drained.  It’s no use to anyone anymore.  It should have been thrown away.”

Myers looks down his long nose at the redhead.  “What I think, Bailey, is that if you had come and told me as soon as you received the intel about the portal, we’d have found the host that very night.  And we wouldn’t have spent the day dodging the cops.”

Bailey snarls.  “You better not be throwin’ that bum rap around in front of the boss.  I _did_ tell you immediately.  _You_ were the one who said it could wait till morning.”  His speech patterns are confused, like a man trying to forget his humble roots to fit in with his privately-educated co-workers, but not quite succeeding.

“Even in the midst of the drunken haze that is your life, idiot, you should be able to tell the difference between a beer bottle and an actual human being.  You never told me.”  Myers’ words are cutting, but his tone is condescending and bored.  Bailey looks ready to spit fire, but Myers continues before he can speak.  “So, here we are.  Searching all the streets within a five-mile radius of the portal, hoping we stumble upon the host by pure happenstance, and thanking our lucky stars that Schmidt didn’t decide we would serve him better as lab rats.  And we will continue to do so until he sees fit to take us out of the penalty box and put us back on proper assignments.  So try not to do anything else to screw up my chances at a promotion until then, understood?”

The scraping of enamel is loud in Darcy’s enhanced ears as Bailey grinds his teeth.  “Fine.  So, where next?”

There’s a rustling sound and Darcy risks a peek to her right to see Myers handing the Stone over to Bailey and unfolding a map.  Bailey shoves his hands in his pockets and rolls his eyes, rocking back on his heels and tilting his head skywards.  Darcy snaps her gaze back to the poster, and reads the names of the actors in their blue font for the millionth time.  _Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Freddie Bartholomew, Jimmy Lyndon –_

“’Scuse me, ma’am.”

Darcy jumps a mile in the air at the familiar voice, now just a few inches away and directed at her.  Wide-eyed and unable to ignore her racing heartbeat and flipping stomach, she turns to look at Bailey standing in front of her.

His eyes rake up and down her body in a way she’s used to from men, but from him it’s extra disconcerting.  His gaze returns frequently to her breasts, and he’s standing too close to be polite.  She wants to take a step back, but her feet have frozen in place.

He’s giving her a smile he probably thinks is charming – and maybe it would be, if she didn’t already know what he was.  The toothy grin is slightly bashful and boyish, like he’s trying to pull off the _aw, shucks_ expression Steve does so well, but the underlying aggressive stance ruins it.  This is a man who has always been physically stronger than most of his peers, and has never learned humility.  Not like her Steve.  Not like Steve at all.

He shuffles his feet the way Steve does and says _ma’am_ the way Steve does and the comparison makes her want to be sick because they are not the same, not one bit, this man is mocking her with the title, and he’s probably a murderer and a bully and her Steve is respectful and kind and gentle, a blond puppy of a man, and the sweet, sheepish face is _his_ thing and how _dare_ this son of a bitch steal it –

The redhead is looking at her with a raised eyebrow, his smile becoming strained, and she realises he’s asked her for directions and she’s just standing there, staring at him, shock and fear and hatred and anger warring inside her and making it impossible to think straight and making her shiver with suppressed lightning.

God, she hopes her eyes haven't turned purple.

“My partner over there, he’s all about maps, but I’d much rather ask directions,” Bailey says, persevering.  “Best to talk to a local.  An’ if there happens to be a pretty dame like yourself standing nearby, well, then I’ve got somethin’ nice to look at while I educate myself, right?”

His hands are out of his pockets now and the Power Stone is clearly visible in his right hand, and she has a brief moment of panic, that this is it, they were right and the Stone will react to her presence, and it’ll be game over.  But it nestles innocuously in his fingers, looking for all the world like an ordinary – albeit purple – rock.  Still, she’s overly conscious of the Helm of Awe on her palm like a brand, with its tell-tale violet colour the exact same shade as the Stone – although the Stone has lost the other-worldly shimmer that glitters on her palm.  She spares a moment of gratitude for her foresight in always wearing gloves: if either agent saw the symbol she’d be a goner.

She stammers her way through a string of instructions, not sure if she’s getting any of this right, but too worked up to think straight and tell him she’s not a local, she’s still finding her way around herself.  She struggles to drag her eyes away from the Stone as she talks, and she sees the moment he notices.  In an effort to distract him from her suspicious behaviour, she starts gesturing wildly with her hands.  She points at some spot far, far away from herself and hopes that he’ll take himself off over there and find someone new to ask for help when he inevitably realises she’s directed them wrong.

Instead of removing himself from her presence like she hoped, Bailey catches one of her flailing hands and runs his fingers over her silk-covered ones with interest.  The familiarity, the invasion of personal space, the realisation he’s actually trying to _flirt_ with her, all make her want to shudder.  With a shock, she realises he’s holding her right hand, and she snatches it back fast, palm carefully angled downwards.

He raises his eyebrows at her.  “Those are pretty gloves, but aren’t you uncomfortable in this weather?”

Unfortunately, he’s right.  Her gloves may be lightweight, but it’s been getting hotter and hotter, morphing into a full-on heatwave, and she’s garnered more than a few odd looks towards her hands over the past few days.

“Poor circulation,” she grits out, then, because she’s freaking out and her brain hates her, she starts babbling.  “I probably get it from my grandma, you know, she always has freezing fingers and toes, even in the middle of summer, and I guess it’s hereditary, since I can’t go anywhere without these gloves, and people have been staring at me all day and it’s like, hello, my hands are cold, it’s none of your business, and – hey, don’t you have somewhere to be?”  She cuts herself off abruptly before she cracks and tells him her entire life story out of sheer nerves, and also because he’s looking at her like he’s calculating the distance between here and the nearest nuthouse.  She kicks herself for being rude, though – as much as she hates these men on principle, for everything they stand for, she doesn’t want to do anything to stand out in their minds.  Now he’ll probably remember her as ‘that crazy rambling girl who told me to fuck off’.  Or something like that.

Her eyes drift towards the Stone again as if pulled by a magnet, and she snaps her gaze back up to his eyes as fast as she can.

Bailey blinks at her, and turns back towards his partner, who’s looking in their direction with an impatient arched eyebrow.  He walks away from her without saying goodbye, although he does cast a couple of strange glances back her way.  He starts talking to Myers, probably telling him the convoluted directions Darcy gabbled at him, and not saying _hey, that girl looks kinda suspicious, we should kidnap her and torture her just in case_ , but she brushes her hair in front of her face and takes off anyway.

_Power?_

**_Yes?_ **

_I need to… I need to know if they’re following me, without looking back.  Can you adjust my hearing to pick up on their footsteps?_

Again, the street noises fade, and Power helps her zero in on the agents’ footsteps, one set hard and clomping, with maybe a slight limp ( _Bailey_ , she thinks), the other lighter, predator-like.  They’re clearly moving in the opposite direction to her, and after a couple of minutes she’s reassured and her hearing returns to normal.

She steps around a throng of drunk revellers, artfully dodging a grope aimed at her breasts by a particularly inebriated man in a fedora too big for his head, and thinks distantly that he’s lucky neither Steve nor Bucky saw that.  She tries to force her thoughts down that avenue – daydreams about her boys being far more pleasant than fear-soaked imaginings about HYDRA agents – but the drunk man’s leer reminds her of Bailey’s lewd stares, and she can’t get him and Myers out of her mind.  So she resigns herself to running her memories of the first time she saw them through her head, and replaying her latest encounter.  At least that way her brain is forced to stick to reality, and not wander into the dark depths of pain-filled fantasies of them finding her, finding Steve and Bucky and Sarah and Winnifred, and even Charles and Cain.

Then she remembers a detail from the first conversation that she eavesdropped on, compares it to something Power said to her, and a question forms.

_Hey, Power?  You there?_

**_I am listening._ **

_When I first ran into those two, they said that according to ‘the stories’, the hosts are always human.  But you said human hosts are rare.  What’s up with that?_

**_Simple.  Stories are just that – stories, told to make people feel better about themselves, more special._ **

_So?_

**_Humans are an intriguing combination of arrogance and insecurity.  The tales these agents speak of will have referenced human hosts and exaggerated such that it would seem that all hosts were mortal.  An occurrence born of the human assumption that they are the centre of the universe, and the human need to feel important and validated in some way.  Your agents would seem to be the very epitome of this phenomenon: desperate to make their lives more meaningful, and arrogant enough to use and abuse others to do so._ **

_…Huh.  Ok.  That actually makes a lot of sense._

**_HYDRA is a danger to us.  The next time you see those agents, we should eliminate them._ **

_What?  Wait, what?  Oh, hang on.  That’s my fear talking.  You should ignore it._

**_Why?  I am guided by your wishes.  You are afraid of these agents; you want them gone so you can be safe._ **

_Because.  Fear isn't very rational.  If I just randomly killed two people, that would cause a shit-ton of problems.  Not to mention, I'm not sure I have it in me.  Not even if it’s a HYDRA slimeball._

**_Very well.  I will… do as you_ say, _not as you_ feel _._**

_Thanks, Power._

Despite her words, Darcy’s limbs shake all the way home.  She doesn’t feel safe until she’s stepped into the apartment, shut the door behind her and turned to face the concerned eyes of Bucky and Steve.


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy has a difficult talk with Bucky and Steve. Or is it that difficult?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a bit of a rush posting before bed. My updates will probably be a little less frequent, at least for a while, since life is getting in the way.
> 
> I didn't mean for this chapter to happen, but it did anyway. I'm not really sure how I feel about this chapter. Not terribly happy with it, but it's written, and it's posted, and hopefully the next one will be better.

The first thing Darcy notices is that Steve’s holding an ice pack to his left eye, and Bucky’s knuckles are scraped.

Somehow, the knowledge that Steve’s been in _another_ fight bleeds the last of the tension out of her body, and she relaxes fully in the safe familiarity of the apartment and this scenario.  Standing up straighter and dropping her shoulders, she raises her eyebrows at Steve.

“So what was it this time?” she asks, at the same time as Steve says, “We were worried about you,” and Bucky presses a hand to his forehead and sighs, “The hell ‘m I s’posed to do with you two?”

There’s a pause where they look at each other, each politely waiting for one of the other two to go first.  Then Darcy opens her mouth and says, “I did tell you guys I can take care of myself, remember?” at the same time as Steve tells no one in particular, “I swear, this time I had ‘em on the ropes,” and Bucky groans, “Is it too much to ask for you two to stay outta trouble?”

There’s another, longer pause.  Then Bucky lifts his drink and jerks it in Darcy’s direction (he’s drinking a root beer, she realises).

“Ok, you first, doll.”  He looks exhausted and there are worry lines creased around his eyes, and Darcy feels a wave of guilt.

“Nothing to panic about, fellas,” she says as breezily as she can.  “I got a little held up by a couple of people I _had_ hoped I’d never see again, but… it’s fine.  Really.  There was no trouble.  And I'm sure there will continue to be.  No.  Trouble.”  Her voice hardens as she emphasises the final two words.  She glares at Steve on the couch, and he shrinks back behind his ice pack a little more.  “Which is more than I can say for you, mister.  What is this, like, the fourth time this month?  Not counting, um –”

“The time we rescued you?” Steve asks.  Coming from anyone else, it would probably sound acerbic, but she recognises this as Steve’s ‘deflection’ tone, where he grabs onto anything and everything to distract her and Bucky from chewing him out.  Again.

Darcy rubs her temples and comes to sink down next to Steve, the ratty old couch creaking under their combined weight.  “Alright, fine, your proclivity for throwing yourself headfirst into battles you have zero hope of winning probably saved my life, and _definitely_ found me a home and a job and a whole, wonderful life with the two best guys in Brooklyn” – she side-eyes Steve with a half-grin – really, she struggles to stay mad at him for even two minutes – and he smiles back in embarrassed gratitude – “but really.  What happened?”

Last time, it was a couple of guys harassing a young woman waiting for her husband in a diner.  That resulted in a cracked rib and a bruised cheekbone.  The time before that, it was a mugger trying to take a wallet from a little guy (and yet, he was _still_ bigger than Steve), which left Steve winded and with a sprained wrist.  Bucky and Darcy were especially mad at Steve that time – what if the attacker had been carrying a knife?  Or a gun?  The image of Steve bleeding to death in a back alley left Darcy dizzy and needing to sit down.  Steve, of course, just shrugged and pointed out that the mugging was happening, whether the criminal had a weapon or not, and to Steve, that was all that mattered.  If someone is in danger, it’s all he can see.

This time, it turns out, it was a couple of construction workers kicking a homeless man who refused to move.  One of the other workers recognised Steve, and went running down to the docks to find his cousin, who alerted Bucky, who came to Steve’s rescue.  As usual.

“So then Buck threw a couple punches, and they musta decided we weren't worth the bother, an’ walked off,” Steve finishes, wincing as he adjusts his grip on the ice pack.  Taking pity on him, Darcy pats her lap and jerks her head at him, and he lowers himself stiffly until he’s lying on his back on the couch, his head on Darcy’s lap.  She takes the ice pack from him, pressing it gently to his eye, and he relinquishes it with a grateful sigh.  Darcy snorts and cards her fingers through his hair.

“Feel like lendin’ me a bit of that courage, Stevie-boy?”  Lately she’s been picking up a little of their Brooklyn speech, though it mostly only comes out in their company.

Steve’s not-black eye snaps open, and he stares up at her.  “Why, sweetheart, you need it for somethin’?”

Darcy realises her mistake too late, and stumbles over her words, wide-eyed, her hand stilling on Steve’s scalp.  “I – uh – no, I just meant –”

Bucky’s been silent through Steve’s explanation of the fight, but now he comes round in front of them and perches on the edge of the coffee table.  His lips are pressed in a thin line and his grip on his bottle is tight.  “Darce.  Don’t lie to us.  It was obvious somethin’ was wrong the moment you walked in the door.”  His voice is shaking slightly, and it makes her heart ache.  He forces a little humour into his words.  “Though maybe Stevie couldn’t see it, what with his eye swollen shut, an’ all.”

No one laughs.  The intensity of their stares weighs heavy on her heart.  Their faces are taut with concern, and her breathing stutters.

She wants to tell them.  God, she wants to tell them everything, so badly.  But that would put them in danger.  If HYDRA ever did track her down – although how they would, she has no idea, they don’t appear to have any leads, hell, they don’t even know they should be looking for a woman – her boys need to be able to plead innocence convincingly.  Oh, God.  What if they find her?  What if they figure out she’s staying here?  If they come looking for her at the apartment, it probably won’t even matter that Steve and Bucky know nothing – they’ll torture and kill them anyway.

She has to leave.  It’s the only way to protect them.  She has an income now, she sort of knows her way around 1940s New York, and someday soon she’s going to figure out how to get victory rolls in her hair if it kills her.  Survival is a possibility now, not like it was a few weeks ago.

Darcy doesn’t say any of this out loud, though.  Instead, what comes out of her mouth is, “I should move out.”

The now-empty bottle slips from Bucky’s hand and falls to the floor, though it thankfully doesn’t shatter, just rolls half under the couch.  Steve snatches the ice pack back from her and jerks up into a sitting position, and she winces in sympathy for his bruised torso.

“Doll.”  Bucky speaks quietly, holding his body very still.  “You wanna repeat that?  I think I musta misheard you.”

“I –”  Darcy looks down at her hands, unsure what to say.  She didn’t mean to blurt that out, and now she doesn’t know how to deal with the fallout.

“I don’t understand where this is comin’ from,” Steve says, hurt confusion written on his face, and she feels it like she’s the one who’s been beaten black and blue.  “We were only worried about you.  If we’re bein’ too nosy, just tell us, you don’t have to _leave_ –”

Darcy’s head snaps up.  “Oh!  God, no!  No, Steve, no, it’s not that at all, I just wanna protect you, that’s all!”  She freezes, realising she’s once again spoken without meaning to, and there’s no way either of them is going to let this go.

“Protect us?”  Bucky’s voice is still low, but a little stronger now.  “What could we possibly need protectin’ from?”

“You _are_ in trouble,” Steve says grimly.  It’s the tone he gets when he tells her about some injustice he saw, to explain to her just why it was crucial that he go and get himself pulverised by someone bigger and stronger.

Darcy tips her head back and grimaces.  “I don’t suppose we could just rewind this conversation, forget the last couple minutes ever happened?”

Bucky and Steve have got this look on their faces, like they’d fight the whole Goddamn world to keep her safe, and her resolve has already crumbled.  Who is she kidding?  She’d never be able to leave these two behind – _and more to the point_ , she notes with a mixture of elation and despair, _they’d never let me._ She’s too weak to leave them, too selfish.

“No dice, doll.”  Bucky leans forward and takes her hand in his, brushing his thumb over her pulse.  “You’re gonna tell us exactly what’s goin’ on.”

This is it.  Moment of truth.  If she’s going to stay, they have to know what they’re getting into.

“Yeah,” she replies with a wry smile, “I guess I am.”  She takes a deep breath.  “Ok, here goes.  Before I met you guys, I was working with a scientist, a Dr Jane Foster.  Jane’s an astrophysicist, and she was working on building an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.”

“A what?” Steve wrinkles his nose in confusion.

“It’s like a wormhole.  A bridge through space.”  _And time, apparently,_ she adds silently.  Despite desperately wanting to spill _everything,_ she’s more than a little worried of the potential consequences of telling future Captain America and a Howling Commando that she’s from the future.  The temptation to tell them all sorts of things about the war would be too much, and God only knows what that would do to the timeline.  She really doesn’t want to be responsible for a dystopian future where the Nazis take over the world.

 _Not to mention,_ a traitorous part of her brain whispers, _Steve’s going to die, and you know you have to let it happen.  Can you do that if they know you’re from 2011?_   That line of thought steals her breath and threatens to stop her heart, so she shuts it down fast.  It’s way too painful to compute or contemplate so she just… doesn’t.  _Denial for the win._

“Wait, hang on.”  Bucky waves his hands in front of his face.  “You’re an astrophysicist?”

Darcy snorts.  “God, no.  I just worked for one.  Long story.  Anyway, the important part is, one of her experiments backfired.  I got pulled into a wormhole.”

Steve gives a horrified gasp, but Bucky narrows his eyes in understanding.  “That’s how you ended up alone in Brooklyn.”

Darcy nods, but Bucky’s eyes grow thinner.  “So… where _are_ you from, exactly?”

She coughs a little.  “I told you.  Georgia.”

“Uh-huh.”  His tone leaves no doubt that he’s aware there’s more she’s not sharing.  Darcy smiles sweetly at him, and he cracks a small grin for the first time that evening.

“Ok, but none of this explains why you’re in trouble, Darce,” Steve says, bringing them to the matter at hand.

“Shh, I'm getting there.  Something… happened, in the wormhole.  I'm not really sure how to explain it – I'm only just figuring it out myself – but, long story short, I went in an ordinary girl, and fell out the other side with,” she inhales deeply and closes her eyes, “powers.”

Silence.  After a few moments, she cracks one eye open, then the other.  Bucky and Steve are both looking at her, intrigue and surprise clear on their faces, with none of the (at least _small_ amount of) scepticism she was expecting to see.  A grin tugs at her lips.  God, she loves these guys.

Tugging off her glove, she holds out her palm for them to inspect the Helm of Awe, and starts to explain her heightened senses, and the lightning she can project from her hand.  Neither of them questions the truth of what she’s telling them, not even for a moment, but she still feels a demonstration is in order, and from the eager looks in their eyes, they’re hoping for one anyway.  The senses are too difficult to display in any tangible form, so she settles for letting off a few purple sparks.  She can’t help but feel a little smug about her control.  Steve and Bucky watch, mesmerised, as she twists her hand in the space between them, lightning dancing around her skin.  Scanning their expressions for any hint of fear, or disgust, she finds none, and has to fight back tears.

Bucky smirks.  “Now I get it.  You told us we didn’t have to worry about you walkin’ around at night alone anymore.  Any bastard tryin’ to get the drop on you would get a nasty shock, pun fully intended.”

Steve nods in agreement.  “I won’t lie, it’s good to know you’re packin’ that kinda power, Darce.  Sets my mind at ease.”

Darcy pulls her feet up on the couch and curls in on herself slightly.  “Um, actually, about that… You fellas ever hear of HYDRA?”

They haven't, of course.  Bucky recognises it as the many-headed monster from Greek mythology, but both are horrified to learn of the existence of a secret Nazi organisation doing unethical experimentation.

“An’ just when I thought they couldn’t get any more evil,” Steve says, shaking his head in disgust.

“Give it time,” Darcy mutters, then immediately feels guilty.  If Steve knew about the concentration camps… he’d be crushed.  Bucky too.  For all that he yells at Steve for his recklessness, Darcy knows his moral compass is as straight and true as his best friend’s.

“You say somethin’, doll?”

“Hm?  No, nothing.  Where was I?”

“HYDRA,” Steve informs her, helpfully.  “Though, I really don’t see what they’ve got to do with –”  He breaks off suddenly, and Darcy watches the penny drop as he and Bucky drop their eyes back to the Helm on her palm.

The next few minutes are slightly chaotic, where Steve goes pale and Bucky starts running his hands all over her, like he can find physical proof that HYDRA has found her.  Darcy does her best to reassure them, explaining her run-ins with the HYDRA agents, but pointing out that they have no idea who she is or how to find her.

“They’re basically grasping at straws,” she soothes.  “And the more time passes, the colder the trail gets.”

“We have to do somethin’,” Bucky says, not ready to calm down yet.  His hand is on her arm, protective or possessive or both, and Darcy thinks he’s forgotten about it.  It’s trembling.

It tears her up to put this on them, such a terrible thing for them to worry about, but her earlier fear is already dissipating, banished to somewhere not-here.  How could she be afraid, with these two on her side?  And there’s no question that that’s where they are: with her.  They’d take on the whole of HYDRA, no hesitation, to keep her safe, and that terrifies and comforts her in equal measure.

Steve nods enthusiastically, still white as a sheet, but Darcy shakes her head.  “Like what?  There’s nothing we _can_ do.  Trust me, I've thought about it.  They have no leads.  The best thing to do is nothing.  If they haven't found me yet, they probably never will.”

It takes at least an hour, during which time Darcy manages to extricate herself from the boys and make a start on an extremely late dinner, while they continue to freak out, but eventually she’s got them cooling their jets.  Steve comes around first, for once more level-headed than Bucky in the face of the world’s evils, and helps her convince him that coming out of the woodwork would only draw attention to her.

By the time they sit down to eat, Darcy has managed to get them to change the subject.  Discovering she’s not above a little emotional blackmail, she points out that she was scared shitless earlier, and she wants them to take her mind off the doom and gloom.  This gets her a giant hug from both of them, and if Bucky sticks to her side like a limpet the whole time she’s cooking and all through dinner, well, she feels she’s earned a little comfort.

And frankly, so has he.

What she’s just told them is life-altering.  But Steve and Bucky have taken her news like the heroes she knows they are, and she lets a little more of the feeling of _home_ and _safety_ and _family_ settle on her heart, a reassuring pressure.

She rests her head on Bucky’s shoulder and lets the weight of her fear lift away with the rhythm of Bucky’s hand stroking up and down her back, and the warm cadence of Steve’s laugh.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve deals with Darcy's shocking news.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really short update today. Just wanted to get Steve's reaction to Darcy's bombshell, and ended up knocking this out, and thought I'd post it. Nothing special.

Steve watches Darcy and Bucky carefully through dinner.  He and Bucky had known from the moment they met her that there were things Darcy wasn’t telling them – important things – but she’d worn her determination and her flippancy like armour, and they’d got the message.  _Don’t ask_ , received loud and clear.  But Darcy is rooted in their lives now, and so much more important to them than they could ever have anticipated; the secrets were beginning to be a heavy burden on all of them.  The instant Darcy walked through the door that evening, he knew something was very wrong, and Bucky saw it too, no matter how hard she tried to distract them.  When she let her guard down on the couch, he pounced.

He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t wormholes, lightning powers and secret Nazi scientists.

His blood boils at the thought of the two HYDRA agents Darcy described.  As Bucky spiralled, fear and anger pushing him to urge action, Darcy looked to Steve to talk him down.  And he did, like a good big brother.  But as much as he fulfilled the role of the voice of reason, he was struggling to repress the creeping darkness growing inside him.  It’s still there, inky blackness at the corner of his consciousness, reminding him of the icy rage the agents inspire in him.  They haven’t even figured out who Darcy is yet, but Steve longs to tear them to pieces for the things they’ll do to her if they ever find her.  His imagination is working overtime, supplying images of Darcy stretched helpless on a table, screaming at shadowy, dispassionate figures uncaring of her pain, and he has to take deep, slow breaths as the dark, angry hatred threatens to drown him.

Steve inspects Bucky closely, adding pity to the swirling hurricane of emotions he’s trying to get a handle on.  Bucky’s attitude towards ‘his people’ has always been nurturing, protective, and Darcy is no exception.  Considering Bucky’s feelings towards their little stray – which Steve can name easily, although he suspects Bucky hasn’t reached that point yet – he must be suffering some pretty crippling fury himself at the moment.  Sure enough, Bucky’s face is ashen, and he’s unwilling to put more than three inches of space between himself and Darcy at any one time.  He’s putting on a good show for her though, keeping the conversation light and making her laugh.

Steve returns his attention to Darcy, and he realises he can only imagine what it can have been like for her, being snatched from her home by a science experiment gone wrong, suddenly discovering powers, and being hunted by a faction of crazed scientists.  She must have been so scared today, coming face to face with one of the agents.  He’s struck by the urge to hug her again, but he thinks he might never be able to let go again, so he sits on his hands and lets her enjoy her dinner in peace.

If only she’d confided in them sooner.  He can understand why she didn’t, but it breaks his heart to think of her dealing with all this alone.  Taking a sip of his water, he eyes Bucky’s arm around her shoulders and manages a smile.  Darcy is far from alone, and they’re going to make sure she knows it.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

After dinner, Steve excuses himself to go wash up in the bathroom.  Splashing water on his face, he gazes at his battered reflection in the mirror, and allows himself a few seconds of self-hatred.  How can he hope to protect Darcy with such a feeble body?  He clenches the sink until his knuckles are white and trembling, then relaxes, blowing out his breath on a long sigh and hanging his head.

The moment for self-flagellation passes, and he straightens.  He’s never let his size hold him back from doing the right thing before.  He’s certainly not going to stop now, not when it’s Darcy’s life on the line, not when it matters more than ever.  If HYDRA comes for her, they’ll have to go through him, and he _never_ backs down.

Walking back out into the living room, he finds Darcy and Bucky on the couch, and catches the tail end of her sentence.

“…and after I gouged out his eyes and fried him to a crisp, I grabbed that damned switch and beat the fucker with it till it snapped.”  The venom in her voice takes Steve by surprise; he’s never known her wish ill on anybody.  Case in point: despite numerous rants about Mr Jackson upstairs, who leers at her breasts and never misses an opportunity to ‘cop a feel’, as she puts it, she still rushed to call him an ambulance when he fell down the stairs and broke his ankle last week, and stayed with him until it arrived.  This vicious sadism is very un-Darcy, and he wonders what on earth the poor sucker did to her to draw her ire.

Even stranger is the look on Bucky’s face as he listens to her: a combination of grim agreement and soppy admiration.

Steve jerks his head in Darcy’s direction.  “What’s she on about?” he asks Bucky.

“Darcy met Kurt Marko today,” Bucky replies, and Steve’s sympathy for the fellow Darcy was talking about evaporates in an instant.  “She was just tellin’ me all about his bloody fate.  It’s really very gruesome.  I almost feel sorry for the bloke.”  Bucky adopts a solemn expression that Steve isn't buying for one minute.  Still, two can play at that game.

“Darcy!” he gasps in his best ‘shocked’ voice.  “I know he’s a terrible person, but violence is never the answer, you know that!”

“What?”  Darcy sounds horrified.  “God, Steve, no, I just –” she breaks off when she realises Bucky’s shoulders are shaking with suppressed laughter.  Steve holds his straight face for a moment longer, but then Darcy whacks him on the arm with no small amount of indignation, and he cracks.

Soon, they’re all doubled over laughing, the tension of the evening giving way to relaxed banter, delicious in its familiarity and easiness.

“Your… face…” Steve gasps in between giggles.

“You telling me I can’t have violent fantasies about murdering a child abuser is pretty rich, considering your face looks like a Picasso painting today,” Darcy shoots back, feigning irritation.

But when Steve examines her face and finds no trace of fear left, all he feels is relief.


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky's turn to deal with his emotional turmoil about Darcy and HYDRA.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, a rush posting. I really need to stop writing late at night, it can't be doing my story any good. This chapter is shorter than I intended - I saw a decent stopping point and decided to bump the rest of what I had planned to the next chapter. Story of my life.
> 
> So, again we have a short update that I feel is missing something. But it's not going to get any better, so here it is.

Bucky feels Steve’s eyes on him and Darcy all through dinner, and tries to ignore the pitying looks Steve is completely failing to disguise.  It’s a relief when Steve excuses himself to the bathroom and Bucky finally has a few minutes alone with his girl to sort through his turbulent emotional state without his best friend watching like a hawk.  Besides the eagle-eyed routine, Steve has been a little off through dinner, stiff, not like himself.  His tension echoed Bucky’s and put him on edge.

The table cleared and the dishes washed, Bucky takes Darcy’s hand and leads her to the couch.  Since she arrived in their lives he’s liked to stick as close to her as he thought he could get away with, but with the shift in their relationship last night, he’s no longer needed excuses to mould himself to her side.  Now, with the new knowledge of the very real danger Darcy is in, the pleasant, spine-tingling desire to be near her has morphed into a primal _need_ , with a desperate edge.

Steve laughs at him, calls him a mother hen, says he’s overprotective – of Steve, of his mother and his little sister, and now of Darcy.  Bucky thinks he’s just the right amount of protective.  But this threat to Darcy is terrifying, and he’ll endure any amount of ribbing to keep her safe.

Darcy plays everything pretty close to her chest, and even after the evening’s revelations, he knows she still hasn’t told them everything.  The answer to the question of where she’s from is definitely more complicated than ‘Georgia’, and she’s carefully skipped over the issue of how she even knows what HYDRA is.  But she has never once lied to him and Steve, so when she spun a story that anyone else would have laughed at, it never even occurred to them to doubt her.

He almost wishes he hadn't believed her, though, because the idea of Darcy kidnapped, taken far away from him where he’ll never find her, to be tortured and killed, is like being dunked in ice water: agonising and debilitating.  Tomorrow, she’ll get out of bed with him, make them breakfast, see them off to work and head out to run errands before the Markos’ driver comes to pick her up for work.  That means several hours where she’s on her own, or wandering around Brooklyn without him, and then another few hours of her being miles away, far out of his reach, where he won’t know if anything happens to her.  Where he’ll be powerless to help.

As he pulls her down onto the couch next to him and wraps his arms firmly around her, he feels the tension running up her spine.  Another burst of protective energy flares through him, and he wants to kill the agents for doing this to her.  Darcy should never have to feel scared, or worried, or live in hiding.

Trying to distract her from the stress of her evening, he asks her about her second day of work.  This doesn’t have quite the desired effect, as her face darkens and she tells him all about Kurt Marko.  Still, she’s thinking about something other than HYDRA, and she lights up with a beautiful savagery as she describes her fantasies about killing Kurt.  Half of him is stuck thinking how he would be right there with her, but the other half can’t help admiring his avenging angel, her features ruthless and gorgeous.  Then Steve emerges from the bathroom, looking more relaxed and like his usual self, and proves he’s back to normal by playing a trick on Darcy.  They laugh till they cry, and Darcy calls Steve a ‘troll’, whatever that means, and the earlier strain is all gone, so of course then he ruins it.

As Steve walks to the sink for a glass of water, Bucky pulls Darcy into his arms.  He’s promised himself he’ll stay strong for her sake – it’s her life on the line, not his – so he’ll soothe her fears and take care of her, not the other way around.  But just for a moment, he lets weakness overwhelm him, and he lets her see a little of his fear.  “I wanna ask you to not go to work tomorrow,” he mumbles into her hair.  “Wanna blow off the docks, stay with you, not let you outta my sight.”

She turns her head in his grasp, her eyes finding his, and she just looks at him.  She doesn’t even need to speak.

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles, “I know better than that.  Still,” he continues hopefully, “Maybe we oughta think about it.  You said HYDRA’s searchin’ Brooklyn?  So what if we weren't in Brooklyn anymore?”

“What,” she wrinkles her nose, “pick up and leave?  Just like that?”

“Yeah, why not?” he says, warming to the idea.  “We wouldn’t even have to go far, just somewhere else in the city.  You might even be able to stay on at your job – they send that fancy car for you anyway –” he pokes her in the ribs teasingly, and she squirms, “– an’ Steve can sell papers anywhere, an’ I could –”

“Whoa!  Easy on the escape plan there, Q!”  She laughs a little, and he files that away as the latest in a long line of things she says that he doesn’t understand.  She fixes him with a serious look.  “You make it sound so easy, but it’s not.  You two are Brooklyn boys, born and bred.  I’d never forgive myself if you left because of me.”  He starts to argue, but she puts a finger on his lips.  “And what about Sarah, and Winnifred and Rebecca?  You can’t just abandon your families.”

“We wouldn’t be _abandoning_ them…”  His protest sounds weak even to his ears, and she gives him a small smile.

“You’re talking about running away.  You do that, you never stop.  What if they decide Brooklyn isn't a big enough search area and expand their radius?  What are we gonna do, skip the country?”

Bucky deflates.  “Yeah.  You’re right.  I just… I wanna _do_ something, you know?  Keep you safe.”

Darcy presses her lips to his in a chaste kiss, but he licks at the seam of her lips until she opens to him, and he squeezes her tight like he can keep her here, in this moment, safe and happy.  Eventually she pulls away, which is disappointing, but the look on her face, a smile as soft and dopey as he feels, makes up for it.

“I get it, I _do_ ,” she tells him in a placating tone, “but we’ve been through this.  The safest, least suspicious thing to do is carry on as though nothing is wrong.  So tomorrow, you’ll go to work, and Steve’ll go to work, and _I’ll_ go to work, and you will _not_ try and talk me out of it, because I have to take care of those kids, and –”

Bucky interrupts her with a sigh.  “Gotta make a living, an’ all that jazz.”

“Exactly.  Oh!”  She jumps to her feet, her face brightening.  “Speaking of…”  She moves to the mantelpiece and starts fiddling around with the radio until Bing Crosby’s voice croons – or at least makes a valiant effort – out of the scratchy speakers.

_Would I grant all your wishes_

_And be proud of the task_

_Only forever_

_If someone should ask…_

Darcy closes her eyes and begins to sway gently on her feet.  “Music makes everything better,” she announces happily.

Bucky watches her, drinking in her bouncing curls, the way her dress hugs her curves, her long lashes brushing her cheeks, and he wants to hold her.

“We should go dancin’,” he says decisively.  He turns to Steve, who’s been listening to them from the kitchen, water in hand.  “Right, Stevie?  All these weeks she’s been with us, and we never showed her a good time.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Darcy shoots back with a wicked grin, which he returns, knowing exactly what she’s thinking about.  Steve chokes on his water, goes bright red, and glares balefully at her.  She just blows him a kiss in return.  Then her face falls.  “Except… I don’t know how to dance.”

“You don’t know how to – ok.”  Bucky stands up and starts pushing at the couch.  “Steve, come help me get this outta the way.”

“What’re we doin’?” Steve asks, coming to bend down next to Bucky.  The couch is moved flat against the wall, and Bucky turns his attention to the coffee table.  It’s covered in Steve’s sketches – a poster a local pub owner asked him to draw.  Steve’s art has been in quite big demand locally recently, and Steve, the perfectionist, stresses over each piece for hours.  Gathering up the sheets of paper into one big pile, Bucky dumps the table in the kitchen, and turns back to survey the small space they’ve cleared in the living room critically.  He nods.  It’s not much, but it’ll have to do.

“We’re gonna teach Darce to dance.”


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dancing happens. Or at least, it tries to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dancing and fluff and romance and friendship, and did I mention the fluff?
> 
> I had to do a bunch of googling about 1940s dance to write this chap. I ended up watching tutorials on swing dance by Howcast on YouTube.

Dancing in 1940 is completely different from dancing in the 21st Century.  Darcy knew this going in, but she just wasn’t prepared for how complicated it would be.  There are actual _steps._

Darcy’s always liked to dance; she’s a music lover, and it came with the territory.  She’d shimmy down the street with her earbuds in, ignoring the looks from passers-by – they were going to talk about her behind her back anyway, so she may as well take advantage of their bigotry to do whatever the fuck she wanted.  She’d jump and spin in her bedroom until her grandmother eventually lost patience and yelled at her to _stop banging_ , and of course she’s been to her fair share of clubs and college parties.  That kind of dancing was mostly shaking her hips and moving to the rhythm, and she loved the freedom in it, but she still longed for more something more structured.

Such as the ballet lessons that she took throughout her childhood, the ones that seemed compulsory for every little girl, and that Darcy secretly loved.  On only one hour a week she was never going to be a prima ballerina, but there was just the one ballet teacher in the area, which meant the woman could charge as much as she wanted, and Darcy’s grandmother wasn’t exactly rolling in cash.

Money was frequently an issue as Darcy was growing up, until she learned to be grateful for what she was given, and then started earning her own money to buy her clothes and makeup.  Her grandmother always got a little glassy-eyed on the subject of money.  She would fix Darcy with a funny look and mutter some variation of the cryptic words, “You won’t have to worry about funds when you’re older, Darcy.  Trust me, money won’t be an issue for you when you're an adult.”  Darcy just assumed Donna Lewis had high aspirations for her granddaughter.  A lawyer, maybe?  Or a banker?  So she’d dream about her cash-filled future, and resign herself to their cash-strapped present.

So, after a few years of begging to take more lessons, Darcy eventually figured out the problem, and, with all her 10-year-old maturity, stuck her nose in the air and capitulated to just one lesson a week, pretending she wasn’t that keen on ballet anyway.  But she was quick to shoot her grandmother down when it was suggested she give up altogether, if she wasn’t enjoying it, huffily pointing out that she had to stay fit _somehow_.  The hopeful note in her grandmother’s voice made her a little guilty, even in the middle of her haze of tragic martyrdom and patting herself on the back for not putting more strain on her family’s finances with extra lessons.  So she savoured what she could get, and even that relatively small amount of formal dance training helps her out here.  It’s hard, but it’s surprisingly pleasant and a little nostalgic to get back to this: being told where to put her arms, how to position her body, when to move her feet.

They start out slow, with Bucky guiding Darcy through the basics of swing: rock step, triple step, triple step, repeat.  It’s pretty simple, and she quickly figures out how to add a bit of bounce in, and looks up to see Bucky beaming at her and Steve perched on the kitchen stool, smiling.  Bucky steps forward and takes her right hand in his left, and directs her left arm to his shoulder, and they move together.  Darcy tries not to get distracted by the feel of Bucky’s hands on her.  It ought to be easy – the dance leaves plenty of room between their bodies – but their relationship is so new, and shiny, and it’s the first time she’s ever danced _with_ a guy like this, and she finds herself feeling a little floaty.  With all of Bucky’s attention fixed so entirely on her, she gets a little giggly, like she’s tipsy, even though she’s drunk nothing but water.

 _Though, I guess you could say I'm drunk.  Drunk on Bucky._   Another titter escapes her at her own ridiculousness, and Bucky doesn’t question it, just favours her with an indulgent smile, eyes sparkling.  A lock of hair falls in front of his eyes and he flicks it away absent-mindedly with a slight toss of his head, and her heart lurches a little.  His movements expose the length of his neck, bringing it within easy kissing distance.  She has to make a concerted effort to concentrate and not lean forward and lick and suck at his skin.  _Well, I could certainly eat him up…_

Distracted by her Bucky-staring (her new favourite pastime), she stumbles over nothing and looks down at her feet to try and keep in step.  This backfires on her, overstretching her hold on Bucky and almost tripping her up entirely.  She keeps her head down, a little embarrassed.  So far, the boys haven't commented on her complete lack of knowledge of dancing, which she’s grateful for, but they have to be wondering how she can be so clueless.  And it’s clear from the ease with which Bucky performs even these few steps (and, of course, Steve’s numerous ‘Bucky tries to impress a pretty dame in a dance hall’ stories) that he’s a great dancer.

But Bucky just chuckles and uses her clumsiness as an excuse to snake an arm tight around her waist (to hold her up, of course) and pull her against his chest.  Which is warm, and wide, and firm… _Stop.  Pay attention, Darcy._

He hooks a finger under her chin and tilts her head up.  “Eyes on me, doll,” he says, his voice rumbling through his chest and sinking into her bones.  “You gotta look at your partner, not at your feet, that’ll only slow you down.  Trust me to lead.”  He smirks at her.  “Do you trust me?”

 _Yes.  In this dance, with my secrets, with my life.  A million times, yes._ “Nope,” she says, popping the ‘P’ and sticking her tongue out at him.

He snorts.  “Cheeky minx,” he murmurs, and kisses her in retaliation, ducking his head down to hers and biting her bottom lip.

She wants to wind her fingers in his hair and trap his lips against hers, but Steve clears his throat uncomfortably from her left, and she glances over to see him staring resolutely at a spot on the ceiling above their heads, slowly turning pink.  Really, she’s going to have to get him used to PDA.

“I need to leave you two alone?” he queries, tone slightly reproachful, but mostly playful.

“Nope,” Darcy says again, “not at all.  Nothing to see here.”

Steve’s gaze drops back down to Darcy, still tucked in Bucky’s embrace, and his face takes on the hyper-innocent smile she’s come to recognise as his ‘I’m about to be a massive troll’ face.  “No, there really isn't.  Buck, you oughta give up on this one.  She’s no Ginger Rogers.”

“Hey!” Darcy cries in mock indignation.  “That’s not fair!  I only started learning, like, ten minutes ago.”

Steve shakes his head sadly.  “And what a wasted ten minutes they’ve been.”  He turns his attention to Bucky while Darcy splutters.  “You should stop while you still can, jerk.  Who knows what kinda injury she could cause you.  I can see it now: ‘The Lothario of Brooklyn, Crippled by Dame with Two Left Feet’.”

“Again: _hey_!”

Bucky laughs, and again the sound moves through her body and she clings to him a little tighter.  She doesn’t miss the way Steve’s eyes zero in on her arms.  For a moment, a shadow of… _something_ flickers across his face, so fast she assumes she imagined it, and then his smile widens slightly.  “I wouldn’t worry about Stevie, doll.  Punk doesn’t have a leg to stand on.”  He raises his eyebrows at Steve and shrugs his arms with Darcy in them.  “Unless you wanna come take my place?  Show Darcy all your hidden skills?”  He winks at Darcy.  “ _Well_ -hidden skills.”

Steve coughs slightly, his cheeks pinking up again, and Darcy latches on to the turning tables.  “Actually, it was _my_ dancing he was criticising, so if he wants to show me a thing or two…”  She steps out of Bucky’s arms, ignoring the urge to press herself back up against his warmth immediately, and gestures grandly towards her… boyfriend?  Fella?  “How about it, Steve?  Come on, come take my place.  Show me how it’s done.”

Steve looks beseechingly towards Bucky for help, but Bucky, in the grand three-week long tradition of teaming up with Darcy to make Steve squirm, simply holds his arms out for Steve expectantly, a shit-eating grin on his face.

It turns out Steve isn't much better than Darcy at swing – or any other kind of dance – and he’s even more hopeless when suddenly thrown into the woman’s position and forced to do everything backwards.  The escapade ends in helpless giggles after the seventh time Steve mixes up the directions and collides with Bucky, this time with them both collapsing on the floor.  The limited space they’re working with really isn't helping, nor is the lack of the right music – the radio keeps churning out slow, crooning songs not really appropriate for swing.  Even when a good song does come on, neither of Bucky’s little disciples has the muscle memory yet to achieve more than a couple of steps before they’re floor-bound again in a flailing heap.

Darcy’s coming to the conclusion that there’s too much sniggering now, and the whole thing is counter-productive to them getting their feet under them long enough to execute a halfway decent dance, turning into a vicious circle of laughter, failed attempts and collapsed limbs.  But they persevere, for the hell of it – and because Bucky has turned himself into the dictator of dance.

Declaring that he’s going to whip both of them into shape, he alternates between pairing up with Darcy himself, and shoving Steve into his place.  The inconvenience of two inexperienced dancers working together is offset by some moves being easier for Darcy with a partner closer to her height, like the she-he turn, where Steve has to turn under Darcy’s arm.

Despite hitting every road bump possible, after about an hour and a half, Bucky finally declares their basic swing steps ‘passable’.

“I wouldn’t be _too_ ashamed to be seen with you two bunglers at the local hall,” he announces, slinging an arm around each of their shoulders.  “Though, I definitely wouldn’t be caught dead with you at the Roseland,” he adds, with fake thoughtfulness.

They all laugh.  Even Darcy knows they’d never get into the famous Roseland Ballroom in the first place.

“So… we’re going dancing?” she pleads hopefully.

He smiles down at her, eyes soft.  “Yeah, baby doll.  I’ll take you dancin’.  God knows I owe you a proper date.”

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

They finally fall into bed sometime into the small hours of the morning.  It’s late, and they’re going to feel it when they have to drag themselves up at six, but Bucky doesn’t regret it.  After the evening they had, they desperately needed something to lighten the mood and wear them out.  As Darcy arranges herself on top of him, he remembers her soft curves pressed against him in the living room and grins.

“Thank you,” she yawns, and he can see her flagging.  She’s even more exhausted than he is.  He suggested she should lie in tomorrow – there’s no reason for her to get up at the ass-crack of dawn just to make them breakfast – but she insisted.  _May as well_ , she told him firmly, _I’ve got things to do.  A little sleep deprivation won’t kill me_.  His mind flits, unbidden, to the things that might kill her, but he tamps it down.  They’ve had a good, fun night, the three of them, and he’s not going to let fear ruin that now.

“For what, Darce?” he asks her.

“I know… s’a lot to take in… thanks for being so…” she waves a hand vaguely in his direction, “ _you._   For wantin’ to protect… for teaching… dance…”

He smiles against her temple and strokes her soft curls.  “No problem, doll.  I’d do anythin’ for you, y’know that?” he adds in a whisper.

Darcy nods, slowly, against his chest.  “I know,” she murmurs.  She’s silent for so long, he thinks she must have fallen asleep.  But then she sighs.  “Got all this… _power_ , now.  Don’ wanna be… corrupted…”

Bucky’s hand stills in his hair for a moment, his heart aching for his girl.  “That’ll never happen, Darcy-doll.  I _know_ you.  That’ll never happen.”

“Promise?” she asks sleepily, steadily going soft and boneless on top of him.

“Promise,” he whispers fiercely into her hair.

He feels her smile against his neck.  “If you say so… I c’n always trust you… I love you.”

And then she’s gone, snoring ever so gently, leaving him frozen and shocked and panicked and happy and having to whisper his reply to a girl who can’t hear him.

“I love you too, Darcy Lewis.”


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As they get out of bed and prepare for work, Bucky teases Darcy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is more fluff, because it's so much fun to write. And Bucky's being a mean tease to Darcy, who was too tired last night to remember that super-important thing she said.

Darcy wakes with her head pillowed on Bucky’s chest, relaxed happiness warming her limbs – and also making it super difficult to get out of bed.  She _really_ didn’t get enough sleep last night.  For a moment she contemplates taking Bucky’s advice after all, and sleeping in, but then she tilts her head up and sees him looking down at her, and she remembers she won’t be able to shower and eat breakfast with him if she does.

Laziness has never been _un_ appealing before.

He brushes a kiss on her forehead, and she nuzzles into his neck, thinking how ridiculously soppy they must look, draped over each other like this.  They’re in the honeymoon phase right now; she knows that’s why she’s happy to snuggle up with him despite the rising heat.  The novelty of sleeping curled up together has to wear off sometime in favour of lying on their own sides of the bed, but right now, tracing a hand over his biceps and feeling his slight shudder under her fingertips, she can’t see it happening in the foreseeable future.

Plus, his bed is pretty small, so there’s that.

They share a shower again, although there’s a marked drop in fun sexytimes this morning.  Under different circumstances, Darcy would be disappointed, but with the way Bucky’s looking at her, she doesn’t feel she’s missing out too much.  He still holds her close under the running water, stroking his hands over her exposed skin in a way that makes her feel beautiful and safe and wanted all at once.  And when he’s not kissing her, achingly sweet, just light enough to drive her mad and make her melt at the same time, he’s watching her.  Bright blue eyes on hers, he seems to be searching for something.  After he pulls his lips away from her, _again_ , and she chases them with a thwarted whine, he raises an eyebrow at her, and she pouts pleadingly up at him.  He studies her for a few seconds, still looking for something.  He must find it, because a moment later he’s smirking at her frustration, gentle and possessive and smug, like he knows something she doesn’t.

Annoyed, she reaches up and tugs on his shoulders, trying to bring him down to her, but it’s like yanking on a brick wall as he resists, flicking water in her face and laughing when she splutters.

“What is _up_ with you this morning?” she groans, blinking droplets out of her eyes.

“Nothin’,” he replies, far too innocently.  “I just really love –”

There’s a hitch in her breath for some reason, and his smile turns a little shark-like.

“– sharin’ a shower with you, s’all.”

“Hmm,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him, not buying a word of it.  There’s a slight sinking feeling in her chest that feels a little too similar to disappointment for her liking, though she’s not sure why.  Ah, well.  She knows just what will cheer her up.  “Whatever, dude.  Get your face back down here, I'm not done with you yet.”

Bucky affects a haughty expression.  “Demanding.  Ask nicely.”

“Kiss me or you won’t be sharing a shower with me again,” she growls.

He raises an eyebrow.

“…for a long time.”

A second eyebrow joins the first.

“…for a little while,” she mutters.

His lips meet her forehead and his right hand skims up her side to cup her breast, thumb rubbing circles over her nipple.  “Oh, really?” he breathes into her skin, and she whimpers a little, admitting defeat.

“Please?” she asks, looking up at him, rounding her eyes and pouting a little.

Bucky’s eyes widen and then his mouth is on hers, pressing more insistently than he has all morning, and banding his arms around her waist as her palms settle on the back of his neck.

Darcy smiles – at least, as best she can with his lips slanted to hers.  _I’ll call this one a draw._

Bucky sucks on her tongue, tearing a moan from her throat and sending shivers down her spine.

_Or not._

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

Darcy keeps up her best glare at Bucky throughout breakfast, which he happily returns with a shit-eating grin.  He’s wearing a dark grey cotton t-shirt that’s just a little too small for him, with short sleeves that leave his upper arms gloriously bare, and she knows he’s aware of her grudgingly appreciative gaze.  Her murderous look intensifies.

Steve eyes her with concern and the kind of adorable innocence only he can pull off.  “Darcy, you didn’t need to get up.  You don’t have work until the afternoon.”  He glances between her and Bucky.  “Did Bucky wake you up to make us breakfast, sweetheart?”  He joins Darcy in glaring daggers at Bucky.  “Jerk, you shoulda let her sleep in.  We’re grown men, we can make our own breakfast.”

This is met with a disbelieving snort from Darcy, and Steve sends her a wounded look before returning his attention to Bucky, who throws his hands in the air defensively.

“Hey, don’t look at me, punk.  I said the exact same thing, but she insisted.”

Darcy nods in confirmation, then goes back to narrowing her eyes sullenly at Bucky.  Steve looks confused.

“Ok… so… what _did_ you do?”

Bucky chuckles, a low, rich sound that makes Darcy fumble the butter knife.

“I think it’s more what I _didn’t_ do.”

Steve looks baffled for a moment longer, then understands and does his impression of the surface of the sun, and goes silent with a quiet “Oh,” staring down at his food.

Ignoring his flaming cheeks, Darcy drops a kiss onto Steve’s hair and another piece of toast onto his plate.  “Eat up, Stevie.  We gotta get some meat on those bones somehow.”  Also, she’s not sure when food rationing is going to start, so she’s got some ideas about fattening him up before then.  Of course, said ideas are more hopeful than realistic, but she’s never been entirely rational when it comes to her loved ones.

 _Wait, loved ones?_ A memory flutters at the corner of her mind, amorphous and fleeting, and vanishes before she can grasp it.

Bucky had her wrapped around his little finger in the shower, and he knows it.  She doesn’t actually mind – not that she’s admitting it – but he’s been giving her this _knowing_ look since they woke up, and it’s infuriating that she can’t figure out what it’s about.  She feels like there’s something important she’s forgotten, maybe about last night, but she was so tired she doesn’t really remember much after they stopped dancing.  A zombie would have had more grace than her getting ready for bed last night – a vague memory returns of Bucky pushing her towards the sink and putting a toothbrush in her hand, unbuttoning her dress and tugging one of his shirts over her head.

A groan escapes her at the thought of how un-sexy she must have looked.  The sound is muffled by the coffee mug she’s holding to her lips.

“Sure do _love_ your cuppa joe, don’t you, doll?”

Her stomach flips at Bucky’s words, and the almost-memory makes an almost-return before it’s lost again, leaving her with a mounting sense of frustration, because she’s pretty sure this is _important_ , dammit.

Steve frowns bemusedly at Bucky, the furrow between his eyebrows growing more pronounced as Bucky peppers the meal with random, disgustingly cheerful utterances, such as:

“Gotta love breakfast.  Best meal of the day.”

“Don’t you love this weather, Darce?  Great for your kids.”

“I love the smell of eggs in the mornin’.”

By the time the boys leave for work, Darcy barely manages to give Steve a hug and a kiss on the cheek, she’s so inexplicably infuriated with Bucky – and her own memory.  She’s almost irritated enough to refuse Bucky his goodbye kiss.

Almost.

After all, that would be cutting off her own nose to spite her face.

They eventually break apart when Steve’s _kill-me-now_ sighs become too loud to ignore, and she practically slams the door after them, leaning her back against it, and relishing the prospect of time alone to get a handle on whatever it is that’s annoying her so much.

The sound of Bucky’s laugh reverberates down the corridor towards her, along with Steve echoing her question from the shower: “What’s gotten _into_ you this mornin’?”


	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy visits Sarah, and remembers something important. Very important.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait, everyone! Life got in the way, and this chapter didn't want to be written. The plot was NOT co-operating. Anyway, here it is!

Left alone in the apartment, Darcy decides to call on Sarah.  Steve’s been worried about her health lately, and since she’s been working night shifts, she’ll be home.  Darcy brings a spare scrap of fabric – a piece of dark blue silk – with her.  It’s been lying around the apartment for a few days now, left over from a failed sartorial experiment, and it’s been irritating her.  There’s something she wants to do with it, but she’s not sure what, and she’s hoping Sarah can help her draw it out of her uncooperative head.

“Darcy!”  Sarah’s tone as she opens the door is delighted, but does little to quell Darcy’s immediate worry.  Her friend’s skin is paler than usual, and she looks thin.

Sarah’s hospitable nature has her offering Darcy tea or coffee, and generally walking around when she looks like she’s about to fall flat on her face.  Unable to take it any longer, Darcy forces Sarah into a seat and puts the kettle on herself, waving off Sarah’s protests.  Eventually, Sarah sits down and stops arguing, though Darcy thinks it must half-kill her to do it.  There’s no doubt about where Steve gets his manners.

Half an hour later, they’re curled up at opposite ends of the couch with their hot drinks, the caffeine seeming to bring Sarah to life a little.  Darcy’s certain that her face is burning as she tries to focus the conversation on her new job, the weather, Sarah’s health, the price of onions – anything to keep _Bucky_ out of it.

There’s a sudden awkwardness accompanying the thought of Sarah knowing about her relationship with Bucky.  It’s not out of fear of judgement – Sarah is probably the last person on Earth who would ever judge – but those soul-searching eyes, kind as they are, make Darcy feel a little exposed.  Even if Darcy didn’t know Sarah personally, she would trust her purely on the basis that she raised Steve.  Because it’s _Steve._ But spending so much of her time hiding the truth about herself means that the feeling she gets when Sarah looks at her, like the older woman can see straight through her, makes her squirm.

Sarah asks a question, and Darcy completely misses the rest of her sentence the moment she says Bucky’s name.  Darcy stumbles and blushes her way through a non-answer, and Sarah fails to hide a smile behind her mug.

She even sells Steve out, spilling all the details of his latest fight, for which she feels only mildly guilty.  ‘Mildly’ ratchets up to ‘extremely’ when she pictures Steve’s wounded puppy face when he discovers what she’s done.

So, so cute, and so, _so_ painful to be on the receiving end of.

Sarah’s eyes darken as she questions Darcy about Steve’s injuries, and Darcy can see pride warring with worry in her mind.  It’s a sentiment Darcy understands well: Steve wouldn’t be _their_ Steve, so unerringly good and kind, if he could just walk on by.  But that doesn’t make it any easier to hold an ice pack to his bruises and wonder if next time will be the one where he has a fatal asthma attack, or his thin ribs just collapse under a punch.

She knows, intellectually, that none of that can happen – Steve still has to become Captain America, after all ( _no, don’t think about that, don’t think about the end of the war, and HYDRA, and the plane, just don’t.  Think.  About.  It_ ) – but worry isn't rational.  And there’s still a tiny part of her, prone to panic, that wonders if just by being here she’s already set a cataclysmic chain of events in motion, becoming single-handedly responsibly for a dystopian future where fascism sweeps the world and Hitler becomes king of the Goddamn Earth.

“Ask Steve to come see me, will you, dear?  I’d like to take a look at him myself.”  Sarah chuckles.  “Sometimes I think he forgets his own ma is a nurse.”

Darcy blinks, grounding herself in the moment again, before smiling back.  “Can you blame him?  He’s gotten into so many scrapes over the years, I bet Bucky could _teach_ first aid by now.  I mean, have you seen him?  He’s really good at it, so gentle and –”  She stops talking abruptly and takes a sip of her coffee, realising she’s walked right into the one subject she’s been doing anything to steer clear of.

And, yep, there’s that little half-smile.  She’s not sure why she bothered trying to hide it, really.  Sarah’s expression is warm and gentle and knowing, and Darcy’s struck by the realisation that with her grandmother hundreds of miles and several decades away, Sarah is the closest thing she has to a mother figure.  Which might explain the embarrassed, but also tentatively excited feeling spreading through her chest.  She actually _wants_ to talk to Sarah about this.

Just give her some time to work up to it.

Going for a distraction with all the subtlety of a steam-roller, Darcy pounces on something she’s been meaning to ask Sarah for a while.

“Can you help me with my hair?  I wanted to cut it, but the boys shot _that_ one down pretty quickly –” she smothers a snicker at the memory of Steve and Bucky’s horrified expressions “– so I really oughta do something with it, but 40s hairstyles – ahem.  Modern hairstyles are so complicated… I’ve just kinda been wearing it loose.  But it’s so hot out!”

Current fashion seems to be for short, curly hair.  She’s got the curly down – sort of.  Most women – even the ones with natural ringlets like hers – seem to pin-curl their hair at night.  But every time she considers going for short, she remembers Steve and Bucky’s effusive compliments about how beautiful her long hair is, and she just can’t do it.  So her hair is too long, not the right kind of curly, and any attempts to put it up so far have resulted in disaster, or a too-modern look.  She’s worried her employers might start to think she looks unprofessional.

“So… help?”  Darcy gives Sarah hopeful puppy eyes.

“You look just like Steve,” Sarah laughs.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

“You are a goddess,” Darcy tells Sarah a short while later.  “You are the queen of hairstyles, problem-fixing, and raising blonds too precious for this world.”

Sarah giggles softly, pink rising in her cheeks.  Steve definitely gets his peaches and cream skin from his mother.  “You look beautiful.”  She brushes her fingers along the hair stretched tight across Darcy’s scalp.  “Your hair is so soft.  I hope it holds.  I'm not very skilled…”  Modesty.  Another trait she passed down to Steve.

In this case, it’s entirely unwarranted.  With deft fingers, Sarah has successfully managed to wrangle Darcy’s slippery and unruly curls into an elegant, low chignon, with a sleek victory roll above her forehead.  Turning her head from side to side in front of the mirror, Darcy feels a frisson of… _something_ run through her.  With her polka dot dress and her handmade gloves and her hair scraped back, she feels like a real woman of 1940.

Funny, what a difference appearance makes.

She always used to dress to stand out, some sort of twisted pre-emptive strike against the people who would single her out anyway.  Like she was saying, _fuck you, you can stare at me, but_ I’m _in control of what you see_.  Now, she looks just like any other woman on the street, and it’s… exciting.  Satisfying.

She imagines Steve and Bucky’s reactions to her new look, and grins.  _So_ this _is what belonging feels like._

She twists in her chair to fix Sarah with an earnest look.  “I want to be you when I’m older.  Can I be you?”

Sarah laughs outright at that, her hands going still, pressed flat on Darcy’s head.  “I think _Bucky_ would rather you were just Darcy,” she says, meeting Darcy’s eyes in the mirror.

Darcy blushes furiously and Sarah laughs harder.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

“It seems silly to waste it,” Darcy says, feeling a little foolish.  “It’s small, I know, but there’s something I wanna do with it, I just can’t put my finger on it.”

Leaning forward, Sarah examines the scrap of blue silk.  “What about a handkerchief?”

A slow smile begins on Darcy’s lips.  “Yes, yes, that would work.”  Her face falls.  “Except I don’t really use –”

“With a little embroidery around the edges,” Sarah cuts her off, “nothing fussy, though.  “And then maybe… a couple of letters?”

“…Letters?” Darcy parrots, confused.

“Naturally,” Sarah continues, with her I’m-A-Mother-So-I-Know-Everything smirk.  “I was thinking something like… a _J_ , followed by, hmm, a _B_ , and then another B…”

Darcy buries her scarlet face in her hands and Sarah snorts and drops a kiss on the crown of her head.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

By the time Darcy leaves, she’s still not happy with Sarah’s health, but she has a little more colour in her cheeks compared to when Darcy arrived.  As Darcy is stepping out the door, Sarah hands her a recipe book she borrowed from Martha, asking her sweetly to return it.  Darcy’s only too happy to oblige – anything to keep Sarah indoors and resting as much as possible.

Still, as she heads for Martha’s shop, she’s already thinking up ways to get in and out as quickly as possible.  She likes Martha, she really does, but she’s very chatty, and Darcy hopes to get in some grocery shopping before Donald arrives to pick her up.  Martha also has a tendency to give her things, little accessories and shoes and sometimes entire dresses, which, although nice, makes Darcy a little uncomfortable.  She’s pretty sure there’s going to be fabric rationing at some point, and she’s worried Martha’s business will suffer – but she can’t exactly explain that to her as she tries to reject the seamstress’ gifts, now, can she?

 _Ah, the hardships of being a time-traveller_ , Darcy thinks, then laughs at herself.  For the millionth time since meeting Thor, she wonders, _how is this my life?_

Despite her efforts to stay focussed on the task ahead, her thoughts drift – as they often do, these days, and entirely without her permission – to Bucky.

It occurs to her that she’s only known Bucky about a month, and that they’ve been _together-_ together for… God, less than 48 hours.  And he’s manoeuvring her sleepy self through a bedtime routine, displaying a kind of casual intimacy that Darcy’s never had before with a guy.  It should feel weird, too fast, too soon, but it… doesn’t.  It just feels right, like this is the way it’s always been between them.

Like this is how it _will_ always be.

After all, she already can’t remember what it was like to _not_ know Bucky.  He’s a constant presence in her life now; when he’s not by her side, he’s at the edge of her mind, where she’s just barely conscious of him.  Like he’s hovering, just waiting to intrude.  Usually in the form of thoughts like: _Bucky’ll laugh so much when I tell him what Charles did,_ or _I'm glad Bucky didn’t see that, he’d never let me hear the end of it._

She can’t do anything now without wondering, either consciously or subconsciously, what Bucky would do in her place, what he would think, how he would react if he were beside her.  And she _always_ wishes he were beside her.

_Bucky, Bucky, Bucky._

And she loves her job, she loves Charles and Cain, but she goes through the hours looking forward to the highlight of her day: walking through the door and seeing Steve and Bucky again, hugging them, kissing Bucky, crawling into bed with him, just _being_ with him, because she loves that, she loves hi–

_Oh, God._

Darcy stops dead in the street.  Pedestrians flow on around her, shooting her irritated looks, but she ignores them, memory and understanding hitting her only now.

Understanding of why Bucky was behaving so strangely, this morning.  Looking at her differently, smiling more, teasing.

And memory: memory of being semi-conscious, holding a sleepy bedtime conversation with Bucky, and three little words that slipped out right before she dropped off.

Three.  Little.  Words.

_I love you._


	27. Chapter 27

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy's day goes downhill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Super short update today, but I'm going on holiday tomorrow, so I don't know if I'll be able to update again for a couple of weeks.  
> Liebekatze, you'll see I've added a little detail just for you!

When Darcy arrives at Martha’s, she’s in such a stupor that she doesn’t even remember when she started moving again.  The woman’s chatter goes right over her head, and she completely forgets to protest when Martha eagerly hands her a brand new pair of oxfords.

“Limited edition,” Martha twitters happily.  “Made an’ designed ‘em myself.  Look at the pattern.  Unique, see?”

Darcy looks.  The shoes are more delicate than most, more appropriate for summer.  They’re also not plain: a delicate cream background is spattered with an intricate flowery design.  Darcy dimly notes that they’re gorgeous.

Martha’s so proud of her design that Darcy can’t help but slip them on, letting her old shoes dangle from her fingers.  Martha beams at her.

It’s only as she reaches the door that Darcy remembers the reason she came in the first place.

“Oh!  Sarah asked me to return this to you,” she says, handing Martha the recipe book.  “She says thanks, and the pork was a big hit with her neighbours.”

Martha takes the book with a smile.  “I’m so glad.  I don’t know if she should be cookin’ at the moment, though, poor dear… how is she?  I wager she’s still goin’ to work?”

“She’s working night shifts right now, I think.  She didn’t look too good, though.  Perked up while I was there, but…” Darcy rubs her free hand over her forehead, feeling her concern bleed through her defences in Martha’s familiar, comforting presence.  “Honestly?  I'm worried.”

Martha clucks anxiously.  “It’s that place.  Infectious diseases ward – she was bound to catch _somethin’_.”  She forces a smile, and with a confidence she’s obviously faking, says, “She’ll come through.  She’s tough, our Sarah.”

Darcy walks out with her emotions in even more turmoil than when she went in.  Somehow, Martha’s reassurance was extremely _un_ reassuring.  Now she’s more worried about Sarah than before, searching the darkest corners of her memory for any information about Captain America’s mother – but as usual, she comes up empty.

So she’s not exactly paying attention to where she’s going when she walks straight into a firm, unyielding back, bounces off it and drops her purse and shoes on the floor.  The man she walked into turns around and opens his mouth, apparently about to shout at her, but then his face registers recognition and he grins instead.

Darcy, on the ground gathering up her fallen possessions, stares at him.  She only has time to think _what the hell kind of luck is this?_ before her mind goes white with fear.

Bailey crouches in front of her and picks up her shoes.  He straightens at the same time as she does and hands them to her with a smile and a raised eyebrow.  “Fancy running into you again.  You live round ‘ere?”

Darcy can’t speak, can’t move, panic rising in her throat.  She needs to say something, anything, because he’s staring at her and she’s drawing attention to herself, and she can’t afford to make herself memorable to him.  But she _can’t_ , she’s just so scared of this man, of what he represents, of the power he holds over her fate, and now her skin is prickling with electricity and her senses are going haywire.  Her vision blurs and sharpens and zooms, and the noises around her become unbearably loud and silent and back to deafening again, and in the midst of it all she hears a whispering, words that sound suspiciously like _kill_ and _destroy_.

Darcy shudders.

“Are you cold, ma’am?”  Bailey sounds disbelieving, and she can’t blame him.  The weather is far too hot for her to be feeling a chill.  Still, her entire body, traitor that it is, has given in to trembling, and his gaze rakes her, from head to toe, before settling on her chest with a leer.  Darcy wills it to stay there, begs him to be enough of a pig to continue this conversation with her breasts, not to look at her face again.  But he does, and she wants to cry.

“You’re a funny one, aren’t you?” he snorts.  “With your gloves in a heatwave and your shivers, and – why are you carrying your shoes?”  He frowns at the pair in her hand, then takes a good look at her feet, and laughs.  “Ah, I see.  Little gift to yourself?  It’s charmin’, how you ladies get in a tizzy over your clothes.  Nice pattern.”

Darcy manages a strangled sound in her throat.  Bailey laughs again.

“Well, you have a nice day now, ma’am,” he says, amusement in his voice.  Then he pats her – fucking _pats her on the head_ – and breezes past her.

For the second time that day, Darcy finds herself rooted to the sidewalk, unable to move.  But it was much nicer the first time.

Her purse is clutched to her chest like a shield as her brain parades out her encounter with the red-headed HYDRA agent relentlessly on repeat.  Somewhere in her stupor of terror, she muses on how very rude he is, hiding his condescension and lascivious stares behind polite _ma’am_ s.  And those comments on her gloves!  True, she hasn’t seen anyone else wearing them in this heatwave, but a brief, carefully disguised conversation this morning with Sarah revealed that it’s apparently normal for ladies to cover their hands in the city for hygiene reasons – so Bailey clearly thinks she’s not classy enough to be wearing them.

That thought, although arguably the most trivial, is the one to snap her out of her daze.  For a moment she hesitates, unsure what to do next.  She’s definitely not in the mood for shopping right now, but she doesn’t want to return to the apartment to stew all alone in her emotions until Donald arrives.  It would be awful to go to Charles and Cain still feeling like this.

After a minute’s deliberation, the solution is obvious.  Darcy turns and starts walking fast in the direction of the docks, and the person who can make her feel safe again.


	28. Chapter 28

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky gets a surprise visit from Darcy at the docks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little shorter than I intended it to be, but since I'm currently on holiday and writing only occasionally, I thought I'd post it or it'd never be up.

A sharp, appreciative whistle sounds out behind Bucky, followed by the voice of one of the other dock workers.

“ _Damn_ , that dame is a looker!”

Bucky grins, but he doesn’t turn around.  Admittedly, he’s a little curious – Ruskin has high standards for a near-penniless man with a nose that’s been broken one too many times – but he just doesn’t feel the _need_ to look.  It’s not uncommon for the neighbourhood girls to linger by the docks, some more blatant about their reasons than others.  He used to enjoy the attention, and has taken full advantage of it many times – with both the coy and the confident – but lately he really doesn’t care. 

“C’mon, Buck, ‘m serious, you gotta see!”

Sure, he’s still capable of admiring a beautiful woman as much as the next man, but it’s like looking at a pretty painting.  He can appreciate the shapes, the colours, the angles; but there’s no feeling there.  It’s an empty, cold kind of attractiveness.

“Bucky?”

So why look when there’s fiery, full beauty to be admired – and _held_ – at home?

“ _Bucky!_ ”

 “Ruskin, I’m really not int–”  The rest of Bucky’s protest is cut off when his friend grabs his arm and drags him round to see –

 _Darcy_ , standing at the end of the boardwalk, eyes scanning the workers, searching for something.  Searching for _him_.

His heart jumps and he starts towards her, but Ruskin slings a companionable arm around his shoulders.

“She’s lookin’ fer someone.  Wonder who the lucky bastard is, eh?”

Bucky’s lips open of its own accord, lips wrenched apart by a rush of excitement and no small measure of pride.  But fate is apparently conspiring against him: now their friends have noticed that they’ve stopped hauling barrels, and are striding over.

“Oi!  You two tryin’ to leave all the heavy liftin’ to us?”

The small group of men gathers round and they make appropriate joking noises of indignation, until Ruskin holds up his hands in surrender and laughs.

“Easy, boys, we weren't ditchin’ you.  Just admirin’ the view.”  He jerks his head towards Darcy, who, now Bucky looks closer, is wringing her hands together slightly – or maybe fiddling with something she’s holding, something he can’t make out.  He squints and, yes, her posture is stiff, her shoulders hunched higher than usual.  A small detail, but different enough from her normally easy stance for Bucky to pick up on.  She’s too far away for him to see her features clearly, but he knows her well enough to imagine the tightness around her eyes.

Something is definitely wrong.  Concern wraps itself around his heart and gives a little squeeze.

Bucky’s co-workers jostle each other for a look, and he gets lost in a little sea of elbows and craning necks.  His friends aren’t the most civilised of gentlemen, and their increasingly bawdy comments fire up an irrigation in Bucky that he’s never felt towards them before.  Possessive jealousy beats at his self-control, making him want to throttle each man with his own words.  One rather explicit fantasy about her red lips and a very private part of the male anatomy proves to be Bucky’s breaking point, and he cuts loose from the throng.

Not least because he’s been plagued by that same desire himself, her green-blue eyes locked on his as she wraps kiss-swollen lips around –

Bucky jogs towards Darcy, his worry building with every step that brings her face into sharper relief.  Her head snaps round at the movement, recognition and relief warring on her face, and she takes a faltering step towards him.  The other workers, presumably assuming he’s off to try his luck with the newcomer, are quick to hoot encouragement.  Or, in one case, disappointment.

“Hey, no fair!  It’s always Bucky!”

“Ah, ease up, Johnny!  He’s got a name to live up to, after all.”

Ah, yes.  His nickname.  The Lothario of Brooklyn.  Bucky turns his head back to send a glare in Ruskin’s direction.  Why did he have to bring _that_ up now?  Darcy is closing the gap between them, and it’s entirely possible that she heard Ruskin’s every word.

It’s not that he’s _ashamed_ of his reputation, exactly, but… Since the evening when he first kissed Darcy, he’s been playing over a few things in his mind – including the way she would laugh when Steve told her about the things he did to earn said reputation.  It would never be quite as clear, as bright, as her unfettered, entirely _Darcy_ laugh.  Initially, he’d thought he was imagining it, or it was wishful thinking, but now, now things are different.  And he wonders… he wonders about that laugh.

He quickens his stride.

The last thing she needs right now is to be reminded of something painful by a stranger.

But – perhaps more importantly – he doesn’t think that man is there anymore, the womaniser, the ladies’ man that his friends know.  That person feels like a stranger, a child with no idea what it is to have a real connection – to have a _Darcy_.

To have someone to love.

Oh, God.  Is that it?  Has she remembered what she said?

His mind immediately goes to the worst place, wondering if she regrets saying the words, if she wants to take it back.  Maybe that’s why she looks so upset?

He freely admits that his teasing this morning was a bit of a jerk move, but he couldn’t help himself.  For one, her confusion was adorable.  Knowing it was a little mean, he kept telling himself that he would explain everything in a minute, or maybe this evening, when they had a little more time.  But really there was no denying it was mostly insecurity.  Last night and this morning, he’d been overflowing with happiness, but Darcy seemed no different than usual, and he concluded that she didn’t remember a thing.

She’d mumbled the words just moments before sleep, and he was plagued with doubts.  What if she didn’t realise what she was saying?  What if it was just the result of a stressful day of high emotion, making her blurt out something she didn’t feel?  What if she didn’t mean it the way he meant it?  It’s not the first time she’s said the words, but it’s normally different, casual; she’ll laugh at something stupid he or Steve does, and say _this is why I love you guys._

Bucky doesn’t doubt that Darcy loves him and Steve both as friends.  It’s just that he’s in so deep already he’s not sure he could bear it if she took back last night’s confession.

So despite his joy he teased and dodged, letting fear get the better of him.  And now she’s here, and it’s time to face the music, as she would put it.

When he’s just a couple of feet from her, he realises that the mysterious object in her hands is actually two objects – her shoes.  Confused, Bucky drops his gaze to her feet briefly, and is reassured to see she is in fact shod.  He doesn’t recognise this pair – something with a pretty floral pattern.  She must have been to see Martha.

Darcy’s hands fidget around the shoes, tugging on the straps and digging her nails into the toes.  She looks a little shaky, and generally not at all like someone who just received a gift (Martha’s taken a shine to Darcy and never lets her pay for anything anymore).  Her lips make a valiant effort to curve upwards, but the result is a warped mockery of the warm smile he’s grown to – well, love.  Hell, may as well admit it, at least to himself.

But all his fears about her feelings are pushed firmly to one side as he comes to the realisation that she doesn’t just look distressed, she looks _scared_.  Even more so than last night, when she came in and told them about the agents –

Shit.

Picking up his pace for the last few steps, he holds his arms out towards her without a second thought.  Her bottom lip trembles and she practically hurls herself against his chest, clinging to him like a lifeline.  Resting his nose against the crown of her head, Bucky squeezes her tight, probably too tight, but she doesn’t complain.  Instead it seems to settle her.  She doesn’t cry, but she takes a few heaving, almost-sobbing breaths, keeping her face buried against him as the tension slowly bleeds out of her body and she can breathe normally again.

Immediate crisis averted, Bucky steadily becomes aware of his surroundings again, and he can feel the far-too interested stares of friends boring into his back.  Unconsciously, he shifts a little so that they see more of his back, and less of his girl.

 _His girl_.  He feels a totally inappropriately-timed surge of glee and pushes it down, hard.

“Darcy, what’s wrong?”

Darcy goes completely still in his arms, then pulls back and starts to talk.  Fast.

“Well, this morning I went to see Sarah, ‘cause I was worried, because Steve’s worried, and she didn’t seem all that great but she got better while we were talking and she showed me how to do my hair…”  And she’s off, babbling at a rate bordering on hysterical, eyes darting around, never quite meeting his.  Deciding it’s best to wait her out, he listens quietly, keeping a hand on her arm, a gentle reminder of his presence.  Eventually, she gets to her visit with Martha, and just as she tells him about the free shoes, she cuts herself off with a choking noise.

“They’re very pretty,” he murmurs softly, helplessly, unsure how to get her to tell him the part that really matters.  “I like ‘em a lot.”

She laughs, a short, sharp, maniacal burst.  “So did _he_!”

And it all comes pouring out.  It shouldn’t take long to tell: the encounter was apparently very brief, but Darcy keeps focussing on small details, like how rude he was to comment on her gloves (Bucky frowns at that, unhappy that anyone would ever suggest Darcy lacked class), and the way the agent ( _Bailey_ _–_ he has a name, and doesn’t that just seem wrong, somehow?  That a monster like that should have something so human as a _name_ ) smiled at her.

By the time she’s done, he has a slightly more complete image of the man in his mind – an image he would very much like to punch.  Apparently, Bailey is crude, arrogant and patronising.  The last one is actually a little comforting: a man like that will easily underestimate a dame like Darcy.  He doesn’t _like_ the idea of other men staring at her breasts when it obviously makes her so uncomfortable, but if it distracts him from his prey…

Nope.  He still wants to punch the man.

Bucky pulls her into another long hug, this one to comfort rather than calm.  Then a thought occurs to him.

“So you came to me?”  He has to fight a grin at the thought.  Now is not the time.

“Um… yeah.  Is that ok?  I’m sorry, I know you’re working, I just wanted to tell you, I feel like I should keep you guys in the loop now, and I…”  Her voice trails off and he nearly doesn’t catch her next mumble.  “I really needed a hug.”

“It’s ok.  It’s very, very ok,” Bucky reassures her.  It’s an understatement.  There’s a fierce, glowing warmth blossoming in his chest, suspiciously close to his heart.  Darcy came to _him_.  She was frightened and upset and she sought _him_ out.

Darcy leans back in his arms, smiling up at him.  It’s a good smile, under the circumstances.  Genuine.  It makes him feel like he’s accomplished a super-important mission: make Darcy happy again.

“Good,” she says firmly, and with a touch of humour – which is unbelievably reassuring.  “Because my only other option was Steve, and his hugs just aren’t as snuggly.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, he’s just too small to really – oh!  _Oh_!”  Darcy wrenches herself out of his grip and punctuates her speech with solid whacks to his arm and chest.  He furrows his brow at her, baffled by this complete change of attitude.  “ _Speaking_ of,” she continues in an arch tone that tells him he’s in trouble, “you were a complete _ass_ this morning!”

 _What’s she… Oh._   He thinks back to what she just said about Steve, and knows immediately what she’s talking about.  His heart sinks before he can stop it.  _She’s going to take it back.  She didn’t mean it,_ he thinks to himself even though he knows it’s irrational.  She came looking for him, didn’t she?  That has to count for something.

Except… Darcy’s scowling at him.  She doesn’t look apologetic, just angry.  He’s silent, at a loss for words, and her glare intensifies.

“ _Say_ something, Bucky!” she explodes.  “What, I tell you I love you and you don’t say it back?”

He can’t help it.  He bursts out laughing.  It’s joy and relief made sound.  She meant it.  She _meant it._

Darcy’s face crumples a little.  “Why are you laughing?  _This isn't funny!_   I am majorly pissed off right now!”  Her words are angry, but there’s a slightly panicked edge to her voice that shuts him right up.

He’s such an idiot.  He’s been so wrapped up in how her words made _him_ feel, so consumed with hope that she was serious and fear that she wasn’t, that he completely forgot that she _never heard him say it back_.  Darcy had already fallen asleep by the time he managed to gather his scattered brain cells to form a response, and now she must have been worrying her head off ever since she remembered, wondering if he felt the same way.

“I love you,” he tells her earnestly, quietly, desperately, skipping right over his confused thoughts and getting straight to the important stuff.  Because he couldn’t bear another second of her not knowing how he feels, another second of her feeling uncertain, or afraid, or preparing herself for heartbreak.

His words are a little abrupt, but that doesn’t seem to faze Darcy.  An ear-to-ear grin takes over her face, and he realises he’s answering with an impossibly wide smile of his own.  He couldn’t control it even if he wanted to.

And this time, _she’s_ the one to answer _him_ , and he hears her loud and clear.

“I love you, too, you dork.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm thinking of picking the next chapter up pretty much immediately where this one ends. So next time will probably be more Darcy/Bucky.


	29. Chapter 29

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy meets Bucky's friends. Who may not be his friends anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry it's been so long since my last update. I know this is totally not what you guys are used to. Unfortunately, I had the summer from hell when my anxiety got really bad, and caused me a bunch of problems. And then I began my year abroad, so I've been living an interesting life in France, which keeps me pretty busy. I will try to update more frequently, but I really can't make any promises. But I can say that this work is definitely not dead. I love it too much.
> 
> Thank you all for the wonderful comments you've been leaving. I'll try to be better about replying to those too. Your support means a lot to me. All that said, I hope you enjoy this chapter!
> 
> P.S. I also slightly edited chapter 28. No plot was changed, I was just really unhappy with some of the writing.

Kissing Darcy is something he could do for a very, very long time.  Her breath is hot in his mouth and her tongue slides against his.  As he cups the back of her head to pull her closer hungrily, he dimly registers that her hair isn't in its usual loose waves.  He feels a brief flicker of disappointment that he can’t slide his fingers into her soft curls as he normally would, but dismisses it in favour of being pleased at the easy access he has to that spot behind her jaw that makes her shiver and push up on her toes.

Eventually, he forces himself back, remembering that they’re in public and now is not the time to get lost in Darcy, no matter how tempting it is.  He doesn’t go far, though, resting his forehead on hers, close enough to feel her little hitching pants against his lips.

Jesus.

He’s a millisecond away from convincing himself that self-control is overrated, when he realises she’s said something.

“Hmm?”  _Yeah, real articulate, Bucky._

“I _said_ ,” Darcy begins, then falters as she looks up into his eyes and whatever she sees there makes her swallow.  “I said, you shouldn’t stop.  It’s in your best interests to keep kissing me.”

“That so?”

“Uh-huh.  See, I was going to plot my revenge.  For the teasing, this morning.”  She leans up and brushes her lips over his, her eyes fluttering closed.

“’S your call, doll.  Your point?”

“My _point_ ,” she murmurs into his mouth, “is that I can’t _plot_ if I can’t _think_.”  Her eyes open again and bore into his own, mischievous light dancing in the blue.  “So you better make sure I can’t think straight.

A slightly animalistic sound rings in the air between them, and it’s not until he’s already got his lips fitted back to hers that he realises he just _growled_ at her.

Once the gears in his brain start moving again, he pulls back and forces himself to look her in the eyes.  Her very beautiful, hooded, slightly dazed eyes.  _Damn_.  “Darcy,” he says, a note of desperation in his voice, “I'm beggin’ you, doll, don’t test my self-control.”  He pauses, considering, then with a smirk, adds, “At least, not in public.”

Darcy sighs regretfully, but sinks back down off her toes.  “Too bad,” she says, pouting a little.  “Probably for the best, though.  I’d feel guilty if I let you mess up Sarah’s handiwork.”  She waves a hand in the direction of her head, and he takes a proper look at her hair for the first time.

Truthfully, he misses the soft waves bouncing around her face, so different from the tightly pinned styles he sees on other women, but…  With her hair scraped back from her face in elegant, sweeping lines, she’s beautiful in a new way.  Her cheekbones are sharper, her eyes more prominent, her long neck more obvious.  She looks –

“You look like a real lady,” he blurts.  “I like it.”  The instant the words have passed his lips, he realises what he said, and he fucking _blushes,_ stammering and tripping over his own damn fool tongue trying to take it back.  “That’s not – I mean – Darce, you’re always a lady –”  He stutters and hesitates, reduced to an awkward teenager the way he only seems to get around her.  Try as he might, he can’t find the words to explain the excitement, the _rightness_ , he feels when he sees her all dressed up like the ladies kissing their husbands goodbye on their way to work, or chatting with their friends in the street.

Darcy laughs at him.  “Easy, Buckster” – and really, where was she coming up with all these silly names for him? – “I know what you mean.  I saw it too, in the mirror.  I blend in.  People still look at me in the street, but it’s different.”

He nods enthusiastically, relieved he hasn't completely put his foot in his mouth.  Then he processes what she’s saying, and it hits him.  It’s so simple, really.

He likes her like this because it makes him feel like she’ll stay.  Permanently.

 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

To their credit, Bucky’s friends allow him a full fifteen minutes – maybe even fifteen and a half – alone with Darcy before their curiosity becomes overwhelming and they invade the nice, warm bubble he wishes he could erect permanently around the two of them.

“Bucky, m’man, you gonna introduce us to your new lady friend?”

There’s just a little too much emphasis on _new_ , and Bucky turns to glare slightly at Hampton.  He’s never been the man’s biggest fan.  Slightly above average in looks, and slightly below average in personality, Bucky’s always thought Hampton carried himself with an undeserved arrogance.

But Darcy’s smiling up at him and saying, “Yeah, Bucky, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?  _Properly_?” and he forgets his dislike of, well, everything.

Lacing his fingers through hers, he turns to the gathered crowd.  “Everybody, this charmin’ creature is the one an’ only Darcy Lewis.  Steve’s cousin from outta town.”  He pauses, long enough for the men to start frowning and for Darcy to let out an adorable, irritated huff next to him.  He squeezes her hand and isn't even ashamed to note his chest actually puffs out as he continues, “And my girl, so you c’n all stop thinkin’ what I _know_ you’re thinkin’ right now.”  He’s rewarded with Darcy’s giggle and the good-natured groans of his friends. 

“Jesus, Bucky, you ever think about leavin’ some for the rest of us?” Ruskin laughs, and is immediately backed up by the others’ furious nods.

“You’ve snapped up all the beauties in Brooklyn, now you’re goin’ for the out-o’-towners, too?”

“You plannin’ on workin’ your way through the whole state?”  This from Tommy, a sweet, burly kid of barely sixteen, and their only part-timer.

Bucky scowls as the behaviour begins its slide from ‘barely civilised’ to ‘rowdy’.  “Don’t you idiots know to keep a civil tongue in your heads in front of a lady?  Darce, these not-so-fine gentlemen used to be my friends, but have just been demoted to co-workers” – he gestures to the men – “an’ there’s no need to learn their names, they ain’t important.”

Naturally, this only makes the group grow more indignant, and they start bickering amongst themselves.  The shoving begins about thirty seconds in, but Bucky isn't worried.  They’re a boisterous lot, and this is just their idea of a fun, lively discussion.  He grimaces apologetically down at Darcy, but she’s turned her head to muffle her laughter in his shoulder.  Her breath is warm on his arm, and he can feel the vibrations down to his fingertips.  Eventually she gets herself under control, and gazes at the crowd for a minute before apparently coming to a decision.  Glancing around, she spots whatever she’s looking for, and tugs on his hand, beckoning him to follow her over to a crate that’s been overturned in the fracas.  One hand on his shoulder for balance, she clambers onto it so that she stands head and shoulders above everyone else, puts two fingers in her mouth, and lets out a piercing whistle.

There’s a brief lull across their end of the harbour as everyone takes a moment to look around for the source of the noise, before the hustle and bustle starts up again.  But Bucky’s friends remain frozen in place, like overgrown kids playing Statues.

Darcy grins down at them, her face a little flushed and a few wisps of hair escaping around her face.

She’s beautiful.

“Alright, listen up,” she begins in a loud, confident voice, and Tommy twists his head up to stare at her – awkwardly, since Ruskin has him in a headlock and doesn’t seem keen on letting go.  “First of all, Bucky’s right.  Y’all need to learn proper behaviour in front of lady – because I _am_ a fucking lady, dammit, and I deserve to be treated like one.”  Bucky stifles a laugh.  He may be used to Darcy’s foul mouth, but his friends look like she’s hit them over the head with the loading equipment.  Ruskin slowly releases Tommy, only to place his hands protectively over the kid’s ears instead.

“Second of all, you can all stop complaining.  True, it’s a tragedy for each and every one of you that I’m spoken for – after all, I'm fucking amazing” – this time, Bucky swears he sees a couple of men flinch, and Tommy finally succeeds in pushing Ruskin’s hands away – “but really, can’t you see the silver lining here?  Bucky’s taken.  Off the market.  Out of the game.  So go forth and flirt, because he won’t be cock-blocking you from now on.”  And with that, she hops down off the crate and pulls Bucky down by his shirt for a searing kiss.

By the time she releases him, he’s almost too dazed to catch her whispered “Thank you” in his ear.

Darcy beams at Bucky’s friends.  “Well, I have to get to work now,” she says, and ten heads swivel to follow her movements, almost independently of their bodies.  Honestly, it’s a little creepy to watch.  “It was nice meeting you all.  Toodles!”  And with that, she smacks one last kiss on Bucky’s lips, and she’s gone, leaving gaping mouths in her wake.

Bucky takes in the sight of his friends, disoriented and doing excellent fish impressions, and laughs.


End file.
